Performed 3.12.2014 at the Hochschule für Musik, Basel, by Miguel Ángel García Martín, Jérôme Lepetit, Carlota Cáceres and João Carlos Pacheco.
Lorazepam tablets are taken by people who suffer from a level of anxiety that makes normal day-to-day life difficult, and in extreme cases impossible. For many people, they provide a way to combat these feelings – but a patient can quickly become addicted to the drug, and its side effects and withdrawal symptoms are very troubling, in some cases even causing a worsening of the original diagnosis (paradoxical effects). But when the choice is to know that you will continue to be unable to function because of how you feel or to try something that could help you escape that, Lorazepam can be the best option available for patients.
Texts taken from the accompanying leaflet to Lorazepam have been used to help us to understand what the drug is, and what it aims to do. The anxiety caused by the situation and the information we are receiving about the drug becomes greater and greater, until it becomes difficult to understand what is being said to us. Eventually, the anxiety reaches a point where it becomes necessary to take the medication to help. But it follows that to reduce one side of your emotions will also dampen the other – making it difficult to ‘feel’ anything at all, and leaving us feeling “surreal, and detached from life” (quoted from the accompanying leaflet in English).