Is ADHD a real disorder?

i'm also on day 5 - not quite as noticeable the effects, but the first day i drank my normal large iced coffee and that plus the new medication was too much i was just vibrating for an hour. no coffee the rest of the week and no more problems like that.

Used to be a doctor would say your kid had a "bad case of the fidgets" and then hit them with a large stick.

This thread is epic ILX gold

Strattera gave me some super vivid dreams

My bff/ex housie is (or was) on that stuff. Worked for him but had some v unpleasant side effects (nausea I think?).

me, skot, trayce, nowell, adam, jess, jbr in the first twenty posts... ten years ago. goddamn.

Oh dear got, J. now I feel old.

well tbf

watch it you.

My dreams were fuuuuuucked up. In the first one, I beat up a woman I thought was a man for propositioning my wife in a coffee shop only to find out that my wife had actually propositioned her. Then I realized that a family with a toddler was looking on in horror the whole time.

In the second one, I realized we had a baby who was Chinese, and I asked my wife what happened, and I had apparently forgotten that we had adopted him, and then when I said "what happened to the baby you were pregnant with?" she told me she had had a miscarriage and how could I possibly not remember that.

They had a lot more vivid detail than that, but that can get boring. In the first one though, I visited several other coffee shops throughout the course of the dream, and in one of them I had a cashier who couldn't understand what a macchiato was and tried to charge me $12 for it. My wife and I also tried to steal a car but then chickened out.

From "is ADHD a real disorder" to "i'm on day five of strattera" LOL

I'm going off my new medication. It was causing havoc w/ my crohn's and my GI system is more important to me atm than getting a boost in attention.

Well I didn't start the thread, xp.

maybe i'll ask my doc about the strattera

FWIW the guy who prescribed me this does not prescribe Adderall/Ritalin etc. because he doesn't like prescribing stimulants.

u could use yr newfound focus to write short stories based on those dreams (would read)

The Strattera Nocturnes

post them on ask dr. freud and he will analyze them, it's a graveyard right now

Went back on the stuff. First script had me clenching my jaw at an increased amount, second script has me occaisionally resting/pushing my tongue against my bottom row of teeth. Also, I get chatty and hyper productive for about two hours in the late morning.

This is me on Adderall ^^^

damn i'm kind of jealous of hurting's crazy ass dreams, last night i dreamed i took a bus to the suburbs and discovered an abandoned indoor baseball court under a cliff and shot hoops with my friend

Another bizarre Strattera dream:

I went to see what was supposed to be Lena Dunham's new comedy film, which also had Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in it. One of the first scenes was a very long "comic montage" of young female commercial airliner pilots (including Dunham, Fey, and Poehler) looking frazzled immediately after having landed their planes and shouting "Open the cockpit door!"

like just a really, really long succession of female pilots anxiously shouting "Open the cockpit door!" one after another

Adderall made my dream so boring and literal i cant even

adderall suuuucks.

i think it makes ADD-inclined people dumber, because it forces their non-linear, creative mind into an analytical straightjacket. i just wanted to make to-do lists and then do the things on the to-do lists.

hey, i never posted on this

i've been kicking it w/ concerta for many years and it really helped me sort out my life. never tried adderall because it never seemed necessary -- first thing tried was ritalin and it was basically just what i needed. switched to concerta because it's one pill in the am (vs a couple over the course of the day, and all of the ups and downs that go w/ that)

i don't think it made me less creative per se, but i guess i view creativity as "ability to create things" if that makes sense? and even if i had ~ideas~ back in the day i was never executing anything. what it did is help me relate to other human beings more effectively because i can finish sentences and listen to sentences and actually absorb what people are saying in a more meaningful way. i'm more engaged with the people around me, able to actually hold down a job and produce work i'm proud of and excited to do, and the only drawback (which at this point, i can't even be sure is the drugs or just me growing up) is that i'm a bit overfocused on my career, maybe at the expense of a romantic life or whatever (but i am also 30 and got on my ideal career path a year ago).

Probably gonna wind up back on this train soon. I only derailed in the first place because my life was collapsing around me a few years back and visits to the shrink/medication were sadly ineffecacious at that point. Here's to hoping a return to Ritalin will give me the focus to get out of my dead-end job already.

Probably should note that I found the effects of Ritalin to be almost completely nullified by extreme and unrelenting stress. For those curious.

what sort of drugs are prescribed if you have high anxiety/ocd/depression as well as ADD/ADHD?

i've found that wellbutrin knocked out my depression (p much) and that helped with my anxiety. it also helps alleviate adhd symptoms, not as completely as adderall did, but it makes them more manageable and is indicated for treating some cases of add

ok that's interesting; i was curious since adderall et al seem like they could really exacerbate anxiety.

yeah... adderall is amazing for what it does, but i think it ultimately is playing with fire when it comes to anxiety/depression. doctors seem suspicious when i tell them that; they seem to think it's a good thing. i did have to go back to it for a while to finish my masters degree. there's nothing else really like it when it comes to reducing adhd symptoms ime

but like, i never want to go near it again, if at all possible

(other people do really well on it though. everyone's brains are different)

I've generally experienced a lot of ADD/anxiety/depression comorbidity, and when the ADD symptoms are alleviated, the other two tend to fade (which makes sense to me, as most of the anxiety or depression I've experienced is as a result of being overwhelmed by focus-related stumbling blocks). Although I acknowledge, as Treeship says, that that obviously isn't going to be the case for everyone

everyone's brain is different but mine is the same as Treeship's apparently. (with the masters degree too.) also sleep is more important than anything else.

i've managed to beat so much of my ADHD. i don't think it's anything lifestyle-related like sugar intake. i just became a more organized thinker. i still chase stimulation/dopamine like crazy, but i concentrate better. i think i had to force myself into doing it. it was one of those things where i became resentful of my neurotypical peers for retaining information really well while multitasking or otherwise paying the absolute minimum amount of attention, while i struggled with concentration and retention even as i was listening intently and taking good notes. me not taking that stuff for granted helped me become kind of a rock star of paying attention.

adderall has been the one thing to help me with my chronic depression and social anxiety.

i think adderall can be super helpful for depression and social anxiety at the right dose and assuming all else is equal (ie youre not an insomniac etc).

hey i'm feeling like... maybe this is me? i have always had trouble dealing with periods of depression and generalized anxiety, but i've only recently come around to the possibility that i might have attention issues as well. my executive function is, let's say, inconsistent at best. i've resisted any sort of medication or diagnosis for any condition for a long time for misguided personal reasons. being a caretaker for a chronically mentally ill sibling will do that, i guess, not because i distrust psychiatric medicine but more because i internalized the role of "the healthy one" during that time. but anyway... i think i need help here.

whatever you decide to do or not do, hopefully you'll find it freeing (as i did) to realize your focus problems aren't a moral failing

xp

i've been on adderall xr once-daily for 12 years and it's been nothing but helpful - before, i always felt my mind could never rest and it like, caused tangible pain via stress and exhaustion and absolutely horrible sleep habits.

it's certainly worth looking into, especially if you think the concentration/mental restlessness issues are exacerbating things like the depression you mentioned.

I quit Strattera because it caused (temporary) impotence, like really bad. Unfortunate, because otherwise I kind of loved it.

The moral failing aspect of taking meds is something I want to throttle people over. It's like, meds have their place, you fuckin' hippie.

I'm sensitive about talking about it out loud.

But that feeling of dread, ennui, pulling yourself up to accomplish This One Task... coming home at the end of the day and feeling like you did nothing... all of that after awhile looks an awful lot like depression.

That's the way it was for me. I tried a few anti-depressants, and it didn't work right. Felt worse.

Once I was diagnosed with the ADD and started getting medication for that, things dramatically improved. Best part is that I'm not a little mouse in a wheel like I was worried about becoming. I'm not scared or as anxious about projects at work anymore. I can sit down and look at the household bills with a clear head. All of those things have kept me off the stairs with my head in my hands lately.

I'm sensitive about it because I still feel like I'm cheating somehow. I will say thought that damn, I might've graduated college instead of dropping out after two-and-a-half semesters had this been around.

But that feeling of dread, ennui, pulling yourself up to accomplish This One Task... coming home at the end of the day and feeling like you did nothing... all of that after awhile looks an awful lot like depression.

this rings so true for me it's sickening

ADD meds and antidepressants helped me survive 6 years of undergrad engineering classes, that's fer sure.

everything you just said pplains rings exactly true for me as well. Except I'm no longer feeling like it's a cheat. It took me a long time to come around to that, but I now don't think it's any more cheating than taking a round of antibiotics for tonsilitis is cheating; you are not well, and there's a clear way to get better, and other people aren't taking antibiotics because they don't have tonsilitis.

It's also valuable to realize that if you need to take add meds, then by taking them you're almost certainly making the lives of the people around you better. After I took them, I was able to repair the nearly-broken-beyond-repair relationship with my father which was largely spurred by the fact that he thought I was a good-for-nothing lazy so-and-so.

In my experience and opinion, depression and anxiety have generally followed ADD symptoms (e.g. I get depressed because I'm not following through on shit that should be easy to follow through on). At any rate, if you think you have a problem, see someone. It's the first step towards digging out of the quagmire.

(Says the dude who inadvisably went cold turkey off his ADD meds and his professional help at the worst time imaginable and still hasn't gotten it together enough to rebuild that bridge five years after the fact. Gah.)