So because of my anger issues, anxiety, inability to get anything done, and problems paying attention to anything I don't like enough. Today I took my first ADHD medication pill and despite being skeptical at first, I'm really satisfied with the results. Yeah it saddens me a bit that I couldn't deal with these on my own but I'm just so happy today. Before this, my whole world felt like a boring, slow, uneventful crawl with no purpose. Sure, I was in downtown Atlanta today as opposed to the boring suburbs where I live which feel like a ghost town but I don't recall feeling this way the last time. I just feel like I've been asleep this whole time. I felt so alive today, I was able to get homework done without having an anger outbreak, I could watch a movie without wanting it to end (regardless of whether or not I like it). I could even have a normal conversation with my mother again which hasn't happened in over a year and talking to people just didn't feel like a chore with awkward silences. So I've had a great day. I also wanted to ask a question to other trans people on ADHD medication and how it's affected (if at all) your dysphoria. I didn't feel too much distracting dysphoria today. My identity is female but it doesn't hold me back that much. I don't like my body at all but I'm not ashamed of it. I don't really seem to care about my body that much despite my identity and me still wishing I had an AFAB body.
I took it too. The result was a severe case of insomnia I could have died from. It's a drug after all. Similar to speed. When I quit, I was so depressed that I was suicidal. My brain was so damaged from these damn pills that I couldn't even read anymore.
Ritalin helps me quite a bit just because it stops my mind from wandering towards thinking about my body and gender. It can be hard at other times because my mind is always everywhere at once meaning that dysphoric thoughts are always present to a certain degree.
Anthracite, I'm so sorry to hear. That sounds awful... why would you continue taking the medication if it was causing severe side effects? Insominia until you nearly died from it? Ritalin leaves your system in a day.... that's so sad. I have to say that your doctor was highly irresponsible to prescribe it to you without differentital diagnosis, depresion and stimulants don't mix well because it makes the stimulants ineffective. Depression causes attention problems and Ritalin can increase symptoms of depression meaning that you first have to treat the depression and only then treat ADHD, furthermore because depression causes atrention problems it is important to rule it out before diagnosing you with ADHD. That sounds like a complete mess. In general, Speed and Ritalin have a similar formula but are not actually the same. The main difference is that ritalin doesn't cause the euphoric feeling that speed does and as such is not addictive. At therapeutic doses which are 10-20 mgs for adults, depending on your weight it is considered relatively safe and is in fact considered one of the most extensively researched drugs in existence and is not really dangerous compared to nearly all other drugs, Aspirin for example is considered much much more dangerous. The problem comes when people self medicate taking 100s of mgs to stay up at night and study or when doctors don't take the time to give a differentital diagnosis as ADHD medication for someone without ADHD can be harmful in certain situations as most likely happened with you. The biggest mistake was continuing to take it despite having severe side effects, there are so many alternatives to ritalin in the market and there is absolutely no reason for a person to continue taking it when it isn't letting them fall asleep. You can actually treat ADHD and depression together but you do so with medications such as Wellbutrin which both treat depression and ADHD. Personally, once I found the right combination of medications, it completely changed my life around. After dropping out from university six times, I was able to graduate with distinction, go on to study in an ivy league level university for my MA and also complete that degree. In other words, for some people with ADHD, it is the furthest thing from being a harmful drug. It isn't a wonder drug but it can make a huge difference as being able to focus fully and not have your attention shift whenever someone makes any sort of sound around you, can be really helpful when trying to write works or to listen in class...
Just to be clear, if you go to a doctor and they diagnose you incorrectly, it is always dangerous. Diagnosing ADHD depends heavily on accurately and fully describing your symptoms. If you hide that you have depression for example, you put yourself at risk in the same way that you put yourself at risk by not disclosing all the symptoms that you have to any other doctor. People make the mistake of believing that ADHD is not a real condition in the same way they believe that being trans isn't real. In fact, brain scans have clearly and conclusively shown that certain regions of a person with ADHD's brain are under developed compared to those without and others are more active. It also is a condition that is passed on at extremely high rates to your children, with around 50% chance to pass it on to your child. It is a developmental disorder that leads to very serious life problems, most untreated people with ADHD drop out of school and college, they have a higher chance to be involved in accidents and go to jail because of impulsive decisions. It effects pretty much every area of a person's life and there is no cure for it. ADHD medication does nothing more than relieve symptoms allowing us to function at the level that most people function in day to day life. ADHD does on the other hand seem to lead to a higher level of creativity as a result of how easy it is for us to contextually connect ideas and thoughts. Unfortunately, this doesn't do much good when you can't focus for long enough to implement your idea.
Three of my teachers and my mother (or parents?) filled out a form leading the doctor to believe I have ADHD. Now, I also have some depression but my attention problems have really been screwing my life up recently. I couldn't even watch a movie with my family even if I liked it because I just couldn't focus on it enough. I was told if my depression gets worse that I should talk to my parents and doctor and stop taking the pills. So far though, I've had no problems.
OK, we need some clarification here. I suspect this is a bit of an exaggeration on the part of the original poster. When anyone starts out on a stimulant, those sorts of effects are not uncommon. In this case, the dosage could have been too high, or it simply could have been that the non-specific effect (how it interacts with this person's metabolism) made it a bad mix. That simply isn't true. First, depression does not have the same sort of inattention symptoms that ADHD does. Second, there are many different medications used to treat depression, and most don't impact the neurotransmitter pathways that ADHD medications do. The differential diagnosis between depression and ADHD is very simple. The symptom patterns look nothing alike. No competent clinician would mistake one for the other, or even mistake a single diagnosis for both. Many people are treated with both SSRIs and an ADHD medication. This is completely untrue. Ritalin (along with Adderall and the other ADHD medications) are amphetamine-class stimulants that are chemically nearly identical to abused amphetamines. Ritalin and Adderall are widely abused, do cause euphoria, capable of buliding tolerance in the body, and absolutely highly addictive. It depends on what you consider safe. Amphetamines have a lot of risk factors associated with them, have a severe impact on the neurotransmission systems they operate on, are highly addictive, and can cause death with overdoeses. Hardly "not really dangerous." That said, used as prescribed, for someone who has received a full and proper workup and differential diagnosis, ADHD medications are extremely effective, generally with minimal to no side effects once the body is used to them. Than amphetamines? I highly doubt it. Aspirin has some risk factors with Reye's syndrome in kids under 16, and some issues with stomach bleeding if it's overused, but other than that, it's been around for 100+ years and is among the safest medications we have. This I agree with. ADHD meds are, on the whole, grossly overprescribed. But I don't think we can assume that the OP was misdiagnosed. It could also be that either there's a strong non-specific effect or the dosage was too high. The suicidal side-effects (along with others) would not be uncommon if the drug was abruptly discontinued rather than tapered off; that's because it does create tolerance pretty quickly. We should not be recommending specific medications. Wellbutrin is an unusual class of antidepressant that works well for some people but also has a lot of specific side effect patterns (among other things, it can cause mania, or exacerbate bipolar symptoms) that make it unacceptable to a lot of people. This I completely agree with. The challenge with any psychotropic medication is that it typically takes a number of tries to find a combination that works. I believe I read that the average patient receiving medication requires 3 medication/dosage changes before a combination is found that works well.
I have taken ADHD medication to aid Narcolepsy, but it did also help a little bit with my dysphoric thoughts. I am not on that medication anymore, as it worsened my generalized anxiety.
I completely agree with the above. Having studied ADHD pretty extensively earlier this year, I did not come across these findings. I did find that in some people there are some brain abnormalities, but these are the exception rather than the rule according to what I read. There is more than one organic cause of ADHD, and then there's the whole overdiagnosis factor. I have no idea where that stat came from, but it is not even close to accurate. It is even arguable whether there's a genetic heritability to it; while there's extensive data that appears to show that, there's also some pretty interesting data that appears to point to the possibility of early childhood bonding issues that have nothing to do with genetic heritability. In any case, the incidence of parent-to-child transmission of ADHD, to the extent it exists at all, is nowhere near 50%. Perhaps there's one study that shows that, but it certainly isn't the majority of thinking on the topic. Uh, no. A very large portion (don't remember the stats offhand) of people with ADHD age out of it entirely by age 20. Furthermore, like most other disorders, it ranges from very mild to very severe. The number of people who have it so severely that it has a lifelong effect is small. Here again, there's a comorbidity between impulse control disorder and ADHD, but the correlation isn't anywhere near 100%. It is impulse control disorder, not ADHD, that is likely to cause the above problems. Many (perhaps a majority) of people with ADHD don't have anywhere near the sort of impulsivity problems that would lead to accidents or criminal activity. The overwhelming majority of people with ADHD simply suffer from mild difficulty with attention, for which mild doses of medication help them to focus. As I said above, a large portion of those with ADHD age out of it and don't need any further treatment later in life. THis is correlational, not causative data. We know that some extremely creative people have ADHD, but there are plenty of extraordinarily creative people who do not. While a number of creative people may have ADHD, we don't know that the ADHD is causal or whether it's simply a common co-factor. Finally, particularly for people under 25 diagnosed with ADHD, there are a number of CBT-based approaches that can, over time, repattern the neurotransmitter pathways associated with attention deficit, so that medication is no longer required, so in addition to those who age out of it, there are quite a few others who, with appropriate therapy and treatment, will also be able to function fully and normally without medication. On the whole, it is often not a lifelong thing and, either by aging out, or thorugh the use of CBT, a lot of people will no longer need treatment once they are beyond their mid-20s.
Yes, it takes a while, and it depends a lot on the severity of the ADHD, but the idea is that, at least up to about age 25 and actually beyond that, we can repattern neurotransmitter pathways in the brain that cause various disorders. The programs I've seen involve a combination of CBT techniques focused on recognizing the patterns of distraction and learning to bring yourself back, along with mindfulness-based meditation. Together, those help to repattern the neurotransmitter pathways associated with ADHD and can reduce or eliminate the need for medication. You might want to get a copy of "Scattered" by Gabor Maté MD. It's an extremely well-researched book that looks at different viewpoints on ADHD and its development. The book "Brain Lock", by Jeffrey Schwartz MD is another good one; while focused on OCD, the techniques it uses can also be helpful with ADHD, as many of the neural pathways are the same.
Sorry my reply was a bit rushed and effected by stupor. I didn't mean to make you worried and I wrote without thinking. Trying to give a fairly complicated crush course on ADHD was a bad idea. I was just disturbed with how extreme Anthracite's words were and I didn't want you to feel anxious about taking the medication. My mistake. I haven't really gone deeply into Chip's replies (I realized that I am going to have to write an entire course about ADHD to give the relevant research to show Chip that he is wrong and so am I in many of the things that we said...) but he is right that it is easy to differentiate between attention problems caused by depression and ADHD. It is just important that the doctor is aware of the depressive thoughts and you are being followed to see if the symptoms aren't becoming worse. Chip, I agree that a few of the things that I said are wrong but so are quite a few of the things that you said. I am limited in ability to find articles to support what I have to say because I am on vacation but I will do my best to give strong arguments based on what I learned, my understanding of people, my own experiences and in cases in which there is easily accessible proof I will direct you to it or link it. Ok lets get into it. Because I'm on my phone, trying to quote is hellish so I will put a star before my statement to mark that I am answering your point. *To be more exact those sort of effects are uncommon to non existent as he talked about suffering from insominia which put him close to death. It was obviously an exaggeration but I replied taking his word for it because I like giving peple the benefit of the doubt. You can't know what that person experienced and making asdumptions is pointless. My intention was to calm shining eyes and doing so meant edplaining why it is an exaggeration. *what I said wasn't simply untrue, there are medications such as Strattera that do both treat ADHD and depression. Just because SSRI's don't treat ADHD it doesn't say anything about how depression and ADHD influence attention. Have you got a source that shows that it doesn't effect the same type of attention. As far as I know there are multiple diffeent manifestations of ADHD and it covers all forms of attention. Depression hinders our ablity to control the direction in which we focus our attention, our focus becomes directed negatively and increasing your ability to remain focused is hurtful because athe focus is on the negative pattern of thinking. This is from my own experience. You typically need to treat your depression at the same time as you treat ADHD because of the danger of becoming even more focused on the darkness... does that make sense to you? I can't go deeper into the neuroanatomy as I don't have my laptop. I understand ADHD quite well but you clearly have a wider understanding of the science behind depression so I might be missing something. No matter what, it is important to differentiate between the different types of depression. As we can't know for sure if the depression others are talking about are of that type. (In the case of Glowing eyes for example, it is unlikely.) *Differential diagnosis is in no way easy and is extremely important, you are giving doctors way too much credit here. Not to mention that you are ignoring the human element, people hide symptoms from doctors, a lot, not to mention, it requires an introspective understanding by the patient to be accurately diagnosed. ADHD is also often diagnosed using a question sheet. In fact, it extremely common for different doctors to give completely different diagnoses to the same patient. Read the DSM, most of the psychiatric symptoms appear in multiple different disorders. If you think it is so easy, please explain to me how it feels to pay attention to something, how well do you focus, how easily are you distracted? There is no way to answer these questions without giving a subjective point of view. No compare it to someone with ADHD, do you find it easier to stay focused or pay attention? Do you see the problem here? Psychiatrists typically use a sliding scale that depends in a patients subjective view. ADHD-PI is usually an invisible disorder, it is very hard to figure out that a person with inattentive ADD is suffering from attention problems. Thry are often viewed as shy and reclusive and low marks are viewed as a by product of that. I can tell you, I went to psychiatrists and they didn't treat me for ADHD and I am in general one of the easier people to treat just because of how introspective I can be. With this in mind, self diagnosis is common as only we can know what is going on inside our head. This can create bias when filling out a question sheet and answering questions which leads to leaving out certain details, psychiatrists also often view people who self diagnose as drug seekers. There is also the question of the ego of the psychiatrist, many psychiatrists see themselves as the only person who can give the correct diagnose to the patient, tbey are the experts and the patient knows nothing. They lack the empathy to understand what is going on in the patients mind and it leads to them rejecting the self diagnosis, instead diagnosing with whatever their instincts tell them which is usually wrong because you can't know everything about a psychiatric patient in twenty minutes or thirty... in other words saying that it is easy for a psychiatrist to recognize the difference between depression and ADHD isn't really accurate because they can't see into the patients mind and they are also just people... Hmm... sorry, at this rate it will take me forever to answer your questions. :lol: I did find some sources that explain that ritalin when taken correctly is not addictive, proof of the high hereditory element and other interesting things to write about, unfortunately it will take me a while to go down your long list because apparently you thought I was wrong about nearly everything... :dry: Was there something in particular that made you decide to try and make it seem like I have no understanding of the subject. Do you feel that my words were harmful in some way? Most of what I wrote is based on the experience and knowledge l that I gained of the subject while acting as a moderator of an ADHD specific forum. I also took a very good fourse about it that gave a detailed explanation of everything that is known Scientifically about ADHD. I did jump a few steps when sharing my thoughts and used conclusive remarks when there is pretty much very little that is actually a scientific fact in psychiatry. However, the know more about ADHD than yoj wouod believe, from genetic markers, brain scans, rest state studies, twin studies and the body of research is constantly growing because around 10% of the population is ADHD and it is something that is unjustly stygmatised. I respect your desire to ensure that accurate information is given and I apologize if what I wrote was not completely accurate. However,you should also hold yourself to the same standards and many of your statements were just as problematic as mine so please be likewise careful about that... (*hug*) If it is important to you I will write a very very detailed response about all your comments when I get home on Thursday. Again, sorry to everybody for using some hyperbole and giving partial explanations that can lead to misunderstandings... and I'm not sure yet but some of what I wrote might be completely wrong, memory can be fickle and I am really really bad at remembering details so I often depend on intuition and logic when analyzing a subject. :icon_redf
I don't have ADHD, but I've ADD, which is close enough. I take medication, but they don't really do anything for me. I'm still kinda trying to find the correct dosage.
I also have ADD and not ADHD it took me 5 years to find a combination of medication that worked for me. Be patient and try different medications until you find one that works. Unfortunately, inattentive ADD tends to be a bit harder to treat and I understand how frustrating it can be...
You've painted a picture of ADHD as a lifelong, incurable illness, and implied that the OP got a poor diagnosis from her physician. The first is simply wrong for a lot of people, the second, we have no way of knowing, and it's entirely possible the symptoms were exaggerated and a normal effect of starting a medication that has a significant impact on a delicate neurotransmitter system. It's also quite possible, as I said before, that the dosage is too high, or it simply was a mismatch because of non-specific effects on this particular person. My approach was to be openminded about possibilties; yours was to call his physician incompetent. I'll leave it to the OP to make the best interpretation of the facts. Look at the DSM-5 definitions and criteria for depression vs ADHD. While depression can cause a lack of ability to focus, the differentials are so wildly different that it doesn't even bear serious discussion here. No remotely competent clinician would mistake one for the other, and the nature of the lack of focus are completely different, mediated by completely different neurotransmission pathways. And this is one of the biggest mistakes people make: Generalizing their own experience to what is appropriate treatment for others. Your own experience is certainly valid for you but we get into trouble when we generalize our own experiences and try to make them the norm of what is known as current scientific thinking. I'm not a psychiatrist, so it is not my place to conjecture on how best to diagnose and treat, but that makes sense to me. I do, however, leave that to those that actually have the training to do so. I do know that most competent psychiatrists will do a full workup and differential diagnosis before prescribing anything, and will often prescribe more than one medication at one time. Unfortunately, some 80% of ADHD meds are prescribed (according to one study) by either general practitioners or nurse practitioners who aren't doing a full mental health workup. The same is true for depression meds. Certainly both need to addressed together, but again, you're conjecturing that the OP even has diagnosable depression, and it's not our place to do that. And it is exactly that sort of reading of the DSM that gets us into trouble. YES, there are many overlapping symptoms with different disorders, but a trained and competent clinician understands the differences in making differential diagnoses. The difference between depression-based lack of attention and ADHD-based lack of attention is so striking that even a general practitioner with minimal training should be able to pick it up. The same is true of pain indexes, which is why high-quality instruments (basically, validated tests and various other criteria) have been developed and tested over thousands of people to help take subjective criteria and extract from them criteria and differentials that allow the professionals who (should be) doing these diagnoses to make accurate diagnoses. Do misdiagnoses occur? Absolutely. And ADHD is grossly overdiagnosed and grossly overprescribed. And the arrogance, carelessness, or hurried nature of American medicine all enter into the fray in terms of poor diagnosis. That's why it's important that accurate information be conveyed to those considering both the diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Wait. If we're talking about when correctly taken, then Ritalin is not as addictive as other amphetamines. Like any amphetamine, it creates physical dependency even at low levels, which is why it should never be abruptly discontinued, so it's far from harmless. It is still addictive, and a lot depends on dosage. And, like all amphetamines, as the neurotransmitter pathways develop tolerance, eventually, the initially prescribed dose no longer works for many people (or works less effectively.) This is basic pharmacology and I can't believe, if you know anything about it, that you're actually arguing this point. Ritalin and Adderall are also very widely recognized drugs of abuse, and there are many, many kids in rehab centers who started out on a prescribed dose of Ritalin (or Adderall, or any of the other ADHD meds) who ended up abusing it and graduating to other, more powerful stimulants (meth, for example.) As for genetics... there are, according to most sources, some genetic factors, but it is certainly not 50%, not if you're using a credible source. There's also evidence that it may not be genetic, or there may be a combination of genetic and epigenetic factors. It is sweeping, inaccurate statements, such at "50% of parents with ADHD will have kids who have ADHD" that are a huge disservice to the community. The wildly inaccurate statements that don't match current study or thinking on the topic. Yes. Among other things, you characterized the disorder as a debilitating, lifelong, incurable illness. For a small number of people, that may be true. But for many others, it is not. It is an area of controversy for sure. As far as Internet discussion forums... I take a lot of what's bandied about in discussion forums with a grain of salt. An awful lot of downright crap is presented as fact in many discussion communities. If we relied on that, we'd believe all the bullshit that's posted on Tumblr or various other forums on sexuality. EC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so we're a bit different from most discussion communities. Part of our values include relying on evidence-based practices for what we disseminate, and that's one of the reasons this community is more moderated than most. But it's simply common sense here: Especially when we are dealing with developing brains of teens, and using powerful medications, we have to rely on evidence-based science when making difficult decisions about topics like this. I also know that a lot of what's known about ADHD (and, for that matter the entire field of abnormal psychology) has changed pretty drastically in the past 5-10 years, and many course curricula has not caught up, so what's accurate 3 years ago may not be current thinking today. We're always open to discussion on topics like this, but they should not be played out in the open forums, because scientific pissing matches don't benefit anyone. One of the goals we have for the next phase of growth is development of evidence-based position statements on a whole variety of topics. And with a lot of this stuff, one of the major issues is the poor quality of a lot of the research in the psychology field, so being able to vet the information and make an informed evaluation of it is often a challenge. But ultimately, what matters isn't whether *I* am right or wrong -- I miss the mark plenty of times -- but that the information conveyed to the EC community is accurate.
I'm honestly quite glad just knowing what I have. I felt inadequate during the entirety of my school years because I couldn't perform to expectations despite being very intelligent. Makes me feel a lot better knowing it wasn't strictly my fault. It also helps knowing that I can pick my studies back up and gain compensation from the government for finishing an education that was failed due to an undiscovered diagnosis. Sweden for the win.
Sadly, I didn't exagerate. It wasn't for ADHD though. It is common in my area that people lie to doctors for prescriptions (I was manipulatated into believing I had ADD) to improve grades. My dosage was way too high.
I have ADHD. I took vicance or however you spell it. I was diagnosed at 8. Took several other medications growing up that made me mean and violent. The one that worked for me the longest was Sraterna (spelling again.) Now since I currently don't have insurance I drink coffee everyday to calm me down which for me helped tremendously with my grades. (I'm in college). Me being trans and having ADHD bothered me when I was 17 I was I was suicidal at the time and my adhd wasn't powered over my depression. It was as if my depression killed the hyperactivity. Since (now 20) I've learned to control my adhd to where it doesn't bother my identity and I've learned to keep them seperate. - Skylar/Sky I've honestly never thought of linking the two. - Skylar
