Sleeping Pill Overdoses?
Question by iidiIlllsIadhhIccciiijhilllIIIIIIIII((: Sleeping Pill Overdoses?
When one commits suicide using sleeping pills, what actually happens when they take the pills? I’ve heard how it’s “painful”. But how is this painful when you’re ‘sleeping’?
I’m not at all suicide, I can guarantee, I was just confused as to what sleeping pills do to someone before they kill them. What medical treatments are used to reverse sleeping pill overdose?
Thanks (:
Best answer:
Answer by Headtater
That depends on the chemicals in use by the sleeping pill. Different medications have different active ingredients.
The most common drugs would cause respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest. In the former, breathing slows until it stops and the person suffocates. In the latter, the heart stops. The reasons for these are varied.
I don’t know if these are painful. However, just because you are out of it does not mean your brain is no longer receiving messages from your nerves. It is possible that a person doing that might feel something.
When an overdose is suspected, the first thing is to get them to the emergency room. You should also try and figure out what they took and how long ago they took it. This will help the doctors a lot. Generally, the patient’s stomach is pumped. Their blood may also be filtered in some cases. Other than that, there is not much the doctors can do other than treat the symptoms, put them on life support if necessary and let the body take care of the toxins.
Answer by katwalker
The answer depends on what exactly the “sleeping pill” is. First, it is virtually impossible to die from an overdose of an OTC sleep aid or from ambien. I mean, there is a toxic level at which death will occur, but it is practically next to impossible given the amount of pills one would have to take. Really, if someone really wants to commit suicide, ambien or OTC sleep aids are a stupid way to try because 99.9999% of the time that person will fail to kill himself, though there may be some nice organ damaga.
Benzodiazepines, however, are a different story. Benzos (e.g., Xanax, Ativan, Valium) are anti-anxiety medications but are also used as sleep aids. I’m not a medical professional, so I don’t know the exact mechanism of how it all works, but they kill people by slowing their breathing and/or heart rate down to levels that cannot continue to support life – not enough oxygen is getting to vital organs. Interestingly, benzos are, along with alcohol, the ONLY drugs that can kill you from withdrawal. It’s no fun to go through withdrawal from herion, cocaine, stimulants, etc., but it won’t kill you. With alcohol and benzos, it can if you abused them heavily enough.
What they would do in an ER depends on what kind of medication a person took. Generally, they pump the stomach to remove any pills that are left so that the medication does not continue to get in the blood stream. Again, not a medical person, but I believe, if necessary, they would give drugs to combat the effects of the drugs the person OD’ed on. For example, if the person’s heart rate was really low due to the ODing, they would give meds to increase heart rate.
Is this painful? Who knows. I have heard from people that remember it that getting your stomach pumped is no fun. Also, typically, when a person ODs on a drug, at some point the body tries to rid itself of the drug through vomiting – also no fun. But most people are not conscious or are semi-conscious when they OD on sleep meds (at least, the kind of sleep meds that actually have a reasonable chance of killing you). So I don’t know what pain means to someone who is unconscious. But, to better answer your question, let’s think about how benzos kill: even if fully conscious, your breathing and/or heart rate would slow down so much that your brain would not receive enough oxygen, leading to coma, then death. So, at some point before death, you will lose consciousness; I imagine it is no different than losing consciousness from fainting (though that is only momentary).
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