81–90 of 115 posts
I'm aware that I act very different while on medication, people around me can very easily tell whether I forgot to take meds that day.
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I live in Vancouver and have had the best success working directly through the local hospital's mental health group. The key is to do a lot of testing. I've also found pink noise to help quite a bit in those times where I need an extra bit of focus. A misdiagnosis and even the wrong medication is the worst to experience. Finally in my 33rd year of life (18 years since finding out about ADHD) I found a medication that…
> This isn't an ad for mirtazipine. :) Genuinely curious - do you in fact take mirtazipine to manage AD(H)D? I've never had it recommended as a treatment option.
I've tried a few other drugs for both ADHD and depression / anxiety over the years, but this one seems to be the sweet spot between helping with everything. Hardly scientific, but it's my experience.
I should note that at lower doses mirtazapine (remeron) helps with insomnia. For me, I'm on a higher dose (45mg) where this isn't the case.
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Honest question: could your success be at all attributed to placebo? IOW, is there any question at all as to whether or not you could have made a conscious decision to "buckle down" and have met the same result? I fear for myself that when facing similar hardship that acquiescing to meds could just be "dealing with the situation" and not properly processing what the actual hardship is, why it exists, and how else it…
> Honest question: could your success be at all attributed to placebo? IOW, is there any question at all as to whether or not you could have made a conscious decision to "buckle down" and have met the same result? I'm 27 now. I began taking ADHD medication when I was 21. With the exception of methamphetamine (yes, it's actually an old, crude ADHD treatment) I believe I've taken every FDA-approved ADHD drug there is -…
I ended up going to a special ADHD clinic and I got diagnosed. Unfortunately, a week and a half after beginning the titration process of Concerta I started getting side-effects (palpitations). Apparently, I also have anxiety, so the doc told me that I could either start again with a slower titration process, or take antidepressants along with the ADHD meds. I decided to drop it and not take any of the meds because the side effects of the antidepressants scared me (not to mention the negative vibe you get from people when they hear that you're on psychiatric meds).
College is really hard for me. I do very well in some classes (mostly in the applied CS courses), and just average to poor in others. The reason is mainly because even though I love programming, many of the Computer Science courses are theoretical and boring to me, so after about a month into the semester I start spiraling down and barely doing the homework assignments, or seriously going over lecture notes to try to gain a deeper understanding of the material.
During the finals, I end up wasting days on doing nothing productive (like right now -- I have a final next week and I'm sitting here doing nothing) until I conjure up enough willpower to actually open the books and start studying (usually the fear of failure takes over and then I force myself to study... with lots of anxiety). And even then, I still find it hard to fully concentrate on the material. I find myself trying to read a textbook, and I feel like my mind and body are pulling me away, so I end up just getting up from the chair, and walking back and forth around the house while my mind just entertains some random thoughts.
I realize that I've been like this my whole life (my High School years are very similar). When I find something that really interests me, I will do it from the moment I wake up, to the moment I go to sleep. For example, I've done programming projects that forced me to learn new technologies where I had to read over 1,200 pages of documentation, and I would just do it obsessively until I'm done with the project. After the project is done though, and it's time to just maintain it (fix bugs, for example), I usually get very bored with it and dump it.
I guess because College assignments aren't interesting to me (for some reason, the grade on the final exam isn't enough of a motivator for me to study) I have a hard time applying myself to them the way I apply myself to things I'm really passionate about.
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What many people don't understand is the stress people with ADD are exposed to. Especially when they're smart. Imagine having a porsche in your driveway, but for reasons you can only use the first gear. No matter how hard you push the pedal to the metal, you won't be as fast as you want the car to go. Plus if you keep going full throttle in the first gear eventually you'll break something. Sounds depressing, doesn't…
I felt the same way, and in the last few years growing up has done much to shift my brain to the next gear. Once I knew what concentration felt like I was able to recreate that feeling and focus. No medication involved.
The ADHD craze is rampant on the USA, but fortunately not in Europe, where I'm from. I'm so glad of that, even if I'm more or less on the opposite side of ADHD when it comes to focus and behaviour. Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying that ADHD is a thing. However, it seems that in the USA it's heavily overdiagnosed, and even worse, the educational system seems to be especially harmful to people with actual ADHD (some…
And I think there is maybe only 3 doctors in Paris that diagnose it. And the only medication available is Ritaline / Concerta.
Of coures not. Those drugs don't address the root cause.
One of the reasons Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy states is for it being effective is essentially ignoring the "root causes" (that may as well be already gone) of problems in favour of actually fixing it.
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I felt the same way, and in the last few years growing up has done much to shift my brain to the next gear. Once I knew what concentration felt like I was able to recreate that feeling and focus. No medication involved.
Same! I'll take adderall regularly for some time. Then I'll get a decent feel for what it's like to concentrate and am able to do it without it. I don't know what's the scientific justification for what you and I are able to do but I'm glad I'm not the only one :D
Each time a study comes out and people will link it to me (I've already had this linked to me three times) claiming that my ADHD medicine doesn't do anything and that it is worthless ... for me it isn't. Without my meds I wouldn't be able to concentrate, I wouldn't be able to get work done. At one point it got so bad at work that I was afraid I was going to get fired since I couldn't focus on any single task at hand…
> Each time a study comes out and people will link it > to me (I've already had this linked to me three times) > claiming that my ADHD medicine doesn't do anything and > that it is worthless... Unless any of those people is a licensed psychiatrist you should ignore them and move on.
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What many people don't understand is the stress people with ADD are exposed to. Especially when they're smart. Imagine having a porsche in your driveway, but for reasons you can only use the first gear. No matter how hard you push the pedal to the metal, you won't be as fast as you want the car to go. Plus if you keep going full throttle in the first gear eventually you'll break something. Sounds depressing, doesn't…
Wow, this sounds exactly like what I've been experiencing for the last four to five years. Even the misdiagnosis, which have mostly turned me off from seeking any kind of mental health treatment. Can you recommend how to screen for a competent psychiatrist specializing in adult ADD?