Do you take Ativan (lorazepam) for anxiety? Watch out; this anti-anxiety drug might increase your appetite. How do I know? Lorazepam (brand name Ativan) restored my mother’s appetite after depression and anxiety severely suppressed it.
How my mother came to take Ativan is an interesting story. She rapidly developed clinical depression, but also present were panic attacks and anxiety. After failing to convince my father that my mother needed an antidepressant (she was adamantly opposed to antidepressants), I battled to get my father to talk to my mother about Ativan, also known as lorazepam.
In general, I am very opposed to taking drugs for mental situations, but my mother’s depression had reached disabling proportions, and after witnessing her decline over only a period of days, I was gunning for pharmaceutical intervention, first starting with antidepressants. When I realized my father wouldn’t budge on this, I then pushed for Ativan.
Ativan had been given to my mother at the ER when she was there to find out why she was getting pain in her hands, arms and shoulder. The nurse gave her two lorazepam tablets to calm her prior to the MRI.
The drug calmed her alright, and when we got home four hours later, my mother, in a perfectly normal mood, promptly began preparing a late evening meal for herself and my father — something she hadn’t done in quite a while due to depression and loss of interest in eating. My father thought that this sudden improvement in mood and appetite was related to the ER diagnosis (impinged nerve in neck, a week later corrected to carpal tunnel syndrome), since this diagnosis represented an answer to why she was experiencing the pain.
I, on the other hand, attributed the appetite restoration and normal mood to the Ativan! Some days later, I had convinced my father that my mother should get a prescription for Ativan; the day after the ER visit, my mother had completely relapsed.
Within 20 minutes of taking her first dose of the prescribed Ativan, my mother announced she was hungry and wanted a hamburger. This was amazing, because for the prior few weeks, it was a struggle to get her to eat just 500 calories a day. The lorazepam seemed to restore her mood, as well as appetite, for the next three days.
Then, after three days, the Ativan stopped working in that my mother’s spirits began taking a dive, and the drug was leaving her very lethargic. However, I kept giving it to her (no more than three tablets a day), because despite the depression’s and anxiety’s return, my mother still had an almost normal appetite.
My brother is a pharmaceutical chemist and told me that the Ativan was behind the resurgence of my mother’s appetite. So even though the drug lost its effect on her mood after only three days, we should still keep giving it to her for her appetite.
However, after about 10 days, the lorazepam seemed to start running out of steam in the appetite department. There was now only a slight improvement; we still had to urge my mother to eat, and sometimes this was a major battle. And then there was the deepening depression and the daily panic attacks.
In summary, it’s clear that in my mother’s case, Ativan increased her appetite; or, to more accurately put it, the drug restored most of her original appetite. The “increase” was actually an 80 percent return to her baseline appetite, rather than an increase exceeding baseline.
Ultimately, I convinced my father to endorse an antidepressant; my mother went on the antidepressant; later a blood test revealed she had an underlying medical condition, and this condition often causes clinical depression. She immediately began treatment for this condition, in conjunction with tapering off the antidepressant. Her baseline appetite is almost restored (I believe that this antidepressant has been somewhat suppressing her appetite).
