I have always suffered from some level of social anxiety, but never really considered it crippling. Years ago, I brought this up to a doctor who promptly prescribed me a drug of the benzodiazepine class. At first I felt like an idiot. Slightly less anxious I guess, but I became kind of loose of the mouth (like you get when you're drunk), forgot a lot of things, and generally didn't like it. However, I stuck with it and a strange thing happened - as I adjusted to the medicine, my anxiety started getting worse. At this point, not taking the medicine had a rebound effect as well that was pretty terrifying, so I avoided that. All the while I was trapped - I couldn't stop using it or I would have panic attacks, but using it was also seemingly causing an increasing paradoxical reaction. I got to a pretty bad place with this over a few months, and ended up having physical manifestations of my inner anxiety (cramps, pins and needles, sweating, inability to sleep, etc). Eventually the only way out was a lengthy taper off the drug. It was literally 3 months of hell. After finally getting back to baseline, my normal anxiety level returned and it seemed like a walk in the park next to what I was experiencing on the medicine.
The point of my anecdote? Medicine can often compound the problem or even create new problems that weren't there before. Once you're in the midst of this, it can be hard to even recognize the medication as the cause, specially if you're taking multiple medications. I'm not suggesting that anyone stop their medicine without talking to their doctor, but at least consider that the anti-anxiety cocktail you're on may be making things far worse. It happened to me, and some research has revealed that these paradoxical reactions are not at all uncommon.