It's right up there with 'I've been clinically diagnosed with ADHD by a qualified psychiatrist and this medication has improved my life tremendously' -- 'There's no such thing, the medication doesn't do anything and you just need to mediate more, have you tried mindfulness?'
You can comment anytime, but people who have been using it less than a decade won't be able to comment on the medications post-tolerence decrease in effectiveness and side effects.
If it takes a decade to build up tolerance and a month to completely get rid of it then sustainability seems clear, no? The problem isn't physical dependence but mental dependence, ADHD forces you to become super strict with yourself to get anything done at all, medication makes you lazy since you just pop a pill and get things done, if you stop trying after getting the pills you will start having problems again just like normal people, but if you keep working as hard as before you took the pills then their effects doesn't go away.
Tolerance to the euphoric and motivating effects builds much faster than a decade. More like a few weeks.
It’s a common problem with new ADHD patients. They mistake the euphoria and motivation for the therapeutic effect, then complain that it isn’t “working” any more and ask for progressively higher doses. Some eventually start doctor shopping to find someone who will prescribe higher doses when their provider refuses.
Have searched Google scholar for quite a while for long term studies (I believe vyvanse was FDA approved 2009), could you help guide on this?
Warning anecdotal but a close neuro doc friend sees 70+ Year olds who took their medication as prescribed still fine when adherence was high. But much more interested in your link if at all possible, I believe there’s maybe 8 million prescriptions outstanding in the USA so any large cohort would be helpful.
When you've grown up with executive dysfunction and excessive difficulty regulating emotion, the ability to choose to sit down and do a task that doesn't grab your attention sure FEELS like a superpower, but all it's doing is effectively medicating your condition.
The best parallel I can think of is that getting effective medication for ADHD is like getting glasses. Suddenly a part of your life that doesn't work (and maybe has never worked) is suddenly functional. People tend to be pretty excited about their glasses when they first get them, too.
> I went through a whole grieving process when I realized how much easier I could've had it all along.
I was diagnosed six months ago and I have absolutely been going through the this same process. At one point I cleaned up a bunch of old boxes (some of which I'd been meaning to unpack for over a decade... yes the meds help!) and came across a folder of my old school reports. Reading through them and seeing the lifelong pattern of struggle with focus and attention that I'd just thought was normal, and that didn't have to have been that hard... I cried, a lot.
> If you believe you have ADHD, and your therapist believes you have ADHD, BUT your life isn't negatively impacted by it, why start treatment now?
If your life isn't negatively impacted by it then you might be hyperactive or have trouble paying attention, but you don't have ADHD, by definition. It only becomes a disorder when it's causing a significant ongoing negative impact on your life.
I don't think you are correct. Just because the name has disorder in it does not mean you have to have a significant negative impact on your life.
It is a mental disorder. My brain functions differently than a normal functioning brain without ADHD. I have built my life in a way so that does not negatively impact my life significantly.
That's the crux of it right there. I've had a wonderful, wonderful life, a rewarding career, a 30 year marriage and raised intelligent, well-grounded kids. Not just by _my_ definition, but by those around me whom I respect.
On the one hand, it doesn't sound like any possible ADHD tendencies you might have are causing you much grief. Also remember that ADHD is hugely situational - I've had a pretty great career and up until a year or two ago I wouldn't have ever suspected I fit the bill. It was only during a perfect storm of overlapping stressors that I really felt like I was struggling.
On the other hand, just because you can survive doesn't mean life has to be this hard. And looking back I now realise that much of my life I was doing just that. I was surviving, when I could have been doing so much better.
I have been unfortunate enough to not be diagnosed with ADHD until middle age, and I'm sorry to hear about your apparent misdiagnosis but for people who actually do have the condition, it's very real and it very much sucks. It's not just "someone walked into the room and I lost my train of thought", it's "I have one simple task to do and I know exactly how to do it and it's been hours but I still can't make myself do the thing no matter how much I want to."
It's "I haven't done my taxes for 18 months even though it would only take a day, and I cannot force myself to do it no matter how hard I try."
It's "I've been unable to fold my laundry for six weeks even though I've alphabetized my cutlery drawer, twice."
It's "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works."
It's lack of executive function when you need it and it's the inability to think about anything else when something's grabbed your focus and it's a built-in character flaw that you can't "just choose to not have" and it's growing up thinking you're "just lazy" but "have so much potential" and it just. f*king. sucks.
If all you need in order to focus on the thing you want to focus on is for no-one to interrupt you, you don't have ADHD.
> "I have to document this project but no matter how much I want to just do it, I nevertheless continually find myself on imgur or Facebook or Hacker News or some random other website reading up about how switched-reluctance motors or Monte Carlo tree search or whatever works."
This is why I learned more about grain bins and low-head dams this week than I did the tool I was supposed to be building.
Ooh did you know grain bins are super dangerous and there's a startup building a grain-bin-leveling robot so that farmers don't have to risk death in their grain bins?
Yeah that wasn't what I was meant to be doing either.
I haven't been diagnosed and don't know where to start. One of my teachers had suggested in early grade school that I had a "developmental disability" but my parents resisted and prevented me from being assessed and prevented me from being in the special needs program. Partially because they didn't really believe in the concept and partially because they feared that it would negatively affect my social development.
I struggled throughout school, struggled even harder throughout university (it took me _many_ years to graduate) and am currently floundering in my job.
I have had the exact same experience with my taxes/laundry/reports but I have no family doctor and no way to get one. Besides a GP, the mental health options for such things in my city are limited to minors and adults in assisted living situations.
See a psychiatrist, if it's an option. They'll ask you to do one or more diagnostic questionnaires, I was given the Weiss functional impairment scale and the CADDRA questionnaire to fill out. Your partner or a close acquaintance will also be required to answer some questions to give an outside view. Answer as honestly as possible (there's no effort at blinding so it's embarrassingly easy to guess the 'right' answers... they really need to work on this).
I don't know about other countries but in Australia if you meet the criteria on the above questionnaires and your psychiatrist's assessment agrees with that then you'll likely be prescribed stimulant medication (Ritalin or dexamfetamine, or the long acting variants Concerta or Vyvanse). I started on dexies and while not everyone's so lucky, for me they were life changing. I can sit down and choose to do a thing... and just do the thing! It's the first time in my life I've been able to do that. I was surviving before but... life just doesn't have to be that hard.
Being unable to do things you should be doing might be ADHD, it might also be depression. Depressed people often live in clutter, piles of laundry, papers everywhere, because they cannot find the will to get and stay organized.
