So I found out a while ago that clonazepam reduces my tinnitus if I take it before bed. Like, a lot. No, I don't mean "I'm less anxious and don't focus on it so my brain lets it fade into the background", I mean "depending on the dose, the main shriek gets so quiet it's barely noticeable in an averagely loud environment, I have to look for it to find it". What a dumb world we live in. There's an effective treatment to my T - too bad it's highly addictive, loses its effectiveness in a few weeks and causes serious tolerance/addiction issues. Meh. This sucks
"Addictive" is a loaded term. Reading about benzos on the internet is a lot like reading about tinnitus; you tend to just read the worst of the worst.
Benzos are incredibly likely to cause a pretty significant tolerance after a period of long term use, and this tolerance necessitates a slow withdrawal should you stop taking them, and can lead to bizarre, unpleasant, and in rare cases incredibly severe symptoms. (I should know, I've withdrawn twice -- and am in the "severe" camp, rare or not).
So, all that is true, and quite noncontroversial. The "loses its effectiveness in a few weeks" is a
lot more debatable though. I was on Klonopin for something like 6 years, daily dose, for perceptual issues and anxiety when I was 20 or so. I don't know that this actually did me any favors because of brain development at the same time, but the point is that the drug never stopped working, and the reasons I went off it had nothing to do with it not working anymore (quite the contrary, it was working smashingly, which was one of the things that made it difficult to withdraw. That said, there were certainly side effects and good reasons for wanting to go off it).
That was 15 years ago; lately, I am back on daily clonzepam, because at this point the quality of life gains outweigh my concerns about what's going to happen 10, 15, 20 years down the road. Tinnitus is not the only (or necessarily main) reason I'm on pills, but if Mutebutton figures their shit out and sells me a device, I will be tempted to look at tapering again.
tl;dr this is a very personal opinion, I think benzos are super dangerous and sketch and most people who take them are not nearly enough aware of the risks,
but I also think there's a lot of misinformation and paranoia about them online, and there certainly is some subset of users who taken them for years or decades without losing their minds or having the drug stop work. In my ~6 years of use, I never had to escalate the dose.
edit: all that said -- as someone else on here put it, "if you're using benzos to treat a problem, it means that you're already dealing with something that can't be fixed". My own history with all this stuff is muddled, and I would certainly encourage anyone who possibly can, to find drug-free ways of managing their lives. Because I
have been through the whole withdrawal horrorshow twice, it's a little easier for me to feel like I'm making an "educated" decision, because I remember, like, being up at 3am, sweating with pinprick pupils, trying to build a faraday cage around my bed. I got through that period, it lasted close to a year, but I got through it so I could do it again if I had to.