Skip to main content

The Year Klonopin Was Taken: Jonathan Harnisch’s Devastating Descent into Protracted Withdrawal

For nearly 40 years, a single pill kept me alive.

Klonopin.
To some, just a benzo. A crutch. A dirty word.
To me—it was breath. Balance. Sanity.

I was diagnosed with dystonia in childhood: a brutal, incurable neurological disorder that contorts your muscles into excruciating knots without warning. Then came akathisia—pure inner torment. Imagine being roasted alive inside your own body and unable to sit still for one second without going mad. That’s akathisia.

From 1985 to 2024, Klonopin—2 to 4 milligrams daily—was my reprieve. Not a cure. A leash on the monster. It let me walk. Think. Create. Love. Be human.

Then it was gone.

The shift wasn’t sudden, but it was savage. Doctors started disappearing. Refills slowed. The whispers grew louder: “Long-term benzo use.” “Addiction.” “No such thing as safe.” Suddenly, I wasn’t a patient. I was a red flag. A liability.

Then, cold turkey.

What followed wasn’t withdrawal. It was obliteration.

My body turned on itself. The pain was primal, molecular. Hallucinations devoured me. I paced until my feet split open. I forgot how to eat. How to sleep. I forgot my face. I forgot what stillness felt like. The noise in my head—like knives dragged across a blackboard—never stopped.

And as my mind shattered, so did my life.

Friends? Gone.
Family? Betrayal.
Professionals? Ghosts.
Doctors? Twenty-four and counting. Not one stayed.

They sold my properties. Wiped my accounts. Stole my copyrights. Deleted my legacy. My 30+ books. My films. My alter ego, Georgie Gust—erased.

Even my name felt hijacked.

But I didn’t die.

I survived the first year without Klonopin. Barely.
And it left me something worse than death—survival without recognition. Agony without acknowledgement.

“Klonopin was the medication that truly worked for me. Surviving a year completely off the drug has only alienated me further from the world.”

This is not a plea. Not a justification. Just the truth.

The medical establishment now treats all benzos as evil. Long-term use? Heresy. But I’m not theory. I’m not policy. I’m a man who found one thing that helped—and they took it away.

This isn’t about addiction. It’s about survival.

The cruelty isn’t just the sickness—it’s the silence. The suspicion. The disappearing act of every provider who once swore to care. I wasn’t weaned or supported. I was discarded.

Protocols replaced people. Guidelines replaced grace.

And the public? They forgot.

What is the worth of a man who doesn’t die—but can no longer live?

My name is Jonathan Harnisch. I am a survivor of dystonia, akathisia, Tourette’s, Parkinsonism, schizophrenia, DID, and now—medical abandonment. I am not a hero. I am not a monster. I am not a “case.” I am a person.

And I’m still here.

Blind, trembling, howling into the void—yet somehow still writing. Still resisting.

This essay isn’t a eulogy. It’s evidence.

There is no award for the man who writes through nerve pain and starvation. No applause for surviving a year of unmedicated hell. But I won’t be erased.

If your medication was taken… If your pain was ignored… If your suffering was deemed “noncompliant”…
You are not alone.

This is not a redemption arc. This is a raw wound written down.
Because some stories—especially the broken ones—must be told.

I am Jonathan Harnisch.
And I am still breathing.

© 2025 Gust Ind LLC. All rights reserved.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Man They Forgot - Jonathan Harnisch (Georgie Gust)

The Man They Forgot An intimate portrait of pain, betrayal, and the long road back from silence. He used to be someone. Not just someone — someone who mattered. In certain corners of the creative world, his name once sparked conversations. He was eccentric, yes. But also brilliant. A rare combination of instinct and intellect. A man who dictated full chapters of novels while painting with both hands. A polymath with charm, quirks, and a storm beneath the surface. He lived loudly. Spoke in riddles. Shone like a cracked gem. Now, some days, he can’t hold a fork. The pen slips from his fingers. Keys fall to the floor like confetti. Sometimes his own name feels foreign on his tongue. And yet, he remembers everything — especially the pain. It begins in the legs, the feet. But “pain” is too simple a word. This isn’t soreness. It’s not a pulled muscle. This is nerve fire — constant, gnawing, electric. His feet feel like they’re being chewed by invisible jaws. His shins? As if they’ve been bru...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Hell Few Survive: Living Through the Unseen Torture of Withdrawal - Jonathan Harnisch (Georgie Gust)

Title: The Hell Few Survive: Living Through the Unseen Torture of Withdrawal By Jonathan Harnisch (Georgie Gust) This is not a cry for help. It is a declaration of war—a war I never chose, waged inside my own nervous system, after being torn off a medication that once held my mind and body together. For nearly forty years, I took Klonopin. I was diagnosed with dystonia as a child—a neurological disorder that twists and distorts the body into painful, involuntary contortions. Later came akathisia, the inner torment that defies language. For decades, Klonopin was my reprieve. It gave me the illusion of stillness, of control. It gave me a life. And then it was gone. Not with support. Not with medical oversight. But with silence, with shame, and with a wrecking ball to everything I had built to survive. The Withdrawal That Isn’t Supposed to Exist They call it "benzo withdrawal," like it's something fleeting, like it belongs in a pamphlet or a line in a psychiatry text...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Year I Stopped Existing (Director’s Cut) - Jonathan Harnisch (Georgie Gust)

The Year I Stopped Existing (Director’s Cut) by Jonathan Harnisch It didn’t begin with an explosion. Or a heartbreak. Or a goddamn siren. It started with silence. The kind of silence that doesn’t echo—it erases. They pulled the plug. Not from a ventilator or a dialysis machine, but from the one thing still barely anchoring my nervous system to this earth. Klonopin. Gone. Cold turkey. After forty years. No taper, no bridge medication, no prep. Just yanked like a weed they didn’t want to explain anymore. And with it, twelve other prescriptions vanished overnight. Decades of medical dependency wiped out with all the finesse of deleting a file you forgot to name. Just poof —goodbye, reality. And then came the descent. Pain is a word too gentle. This wasn’t pain. This was desecration. It wasn’t that my body hurt—it was that it stopped being mine. Muscles jerked of their own accord. My arms flung themselves against walls. My fingers let go of objects I’d never meant to release. Silver...
Post a Comment
Read more