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 it? And that's exactly what happens. People eventually get depressed. It won't go away by itself. When they go to the doctor, it's basically a game of chance. If the doctor is competent, he'll do the proper tests. Unfortunately most aren't. There are a lot of syndromes, illnesses, conditions that match the symptoms.
If the ADD patient is lucky, the correct diagnosis is made. If unlucky, he may be treated for borderline, depressions, etc. Antidepressants may worsen the condition, because they may increase motivation without increasing ability.
A well diagnosed and medicated ADD patient however will lose depression in almost no time.
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 helps my anxiety and depression which allows me to focus on the downsides of the ADHD.
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.
While a psychiatrist can make the diagnosis, IME they're more likely to go after the secondary long-term effects as described above.
Not ADD here, but starting around age 12, my body started freaking out every 4-8 months or so and suddenly my heart-rate would shoot up uncontrollably and my blood pressure would drop out. They told me to lay down and try breathing slowly, and eventually it went away (I was lucky). I was diagnosed with GAD/Panic Disorder with depression. Several years later I ended up actually developing a sever case of panic disorder and agoraphobia, mostly because I was told I had it for so many years.
Turns out I actually had Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome - A heart condition where you have an extra electrical pathway in your heart. Had surgery for that last year and haven't had an episode since. Still struggling with the agoraphobia though. I can only imagine how my life would be different right now had I gotten the correct diagnosis.
Thank you!
That is a good description of how I feel. When I was younger I could spend hours learning things, programming, reading, and playing video games. Eventually, around when I was 16 I would guess, I lost my ability to concentrate, and now I can't sit through a 30 minute TV show without losing focus. It was really bad for me in university, and continues to harm my career.
However, I was actually diagnosed with ADD and tried many different medications. Unfortunately all of the medications I was prescribed were either ineffective or had terrible side effects, so I ended up not taking anything beyond a trial period. Despite this, I used Adderrall two times to prepare for important tests in university. Side effects aside, it is amazing.
Edit: Oh, and also, if you ever had painful ear infections as a child then look into http://www.aitinstitute.org (sound / auditory re-training), or if you've never had your vision properly checked out -- you should be able to see clearly / things in focus with your eyes relaxed, if you're straining them then it means your brain/mind is actively concentrating to focus, which then will take your ability away to focus on other things fully (leading to ADD symptoms).
Edit: As an example the caption of Dr. Farah's photo reads "Dr. Martha Farah and colleagues found no cognitive benefit from Adderall taken by students." Finding no correlation to grade improvement is very, very far from finding "no cognitive benefit."
On the other hand, if they were sloppy, it could potentially argue for a multimodal distribution that when forced into being viewed as an average (or with other tools that assume a unimodal distribution) then the effect gets washed out. One possible case for this is the idea that ADD/ADHD is wildly over diagnosed and, thus the incorrectly diagnosed children might show no improvement while masking the improvement of those who actually have it.
Grade improvements (along with the possibility that over prescribing is skewing the data) are a terrible metric, and a better one would be interpersonal relationships and how they behave in the classroom, which is much harder to measure. If a child is diagnosed pretty late (late elementary or middle school) they might also have a LOT to really catch up on. Just because they can focus doesn't mean they are prepared to deal with the material given to them.
Here's an exercise: try translating your anecdotal experience into boring clinical language, e.g. "one 27 year-old male subject had a small statistically insignificant increase in grades, and self-reported feeling more focused."
> 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...
But perhaps you are expert enough and have enough knowledge about his medical history that he should listen to you instead?
In the U.S. at least, Adderall is best prescribed by a psychiatrist, and while there are many general practitioners who will write you a script for Adderall without referring you to a psychiatrist, they're not following what's considered to be best practice. The same doctor would be considered remiss if they didn't refer their patient with heart disease symptoms to a cardiologist. Adderall is a stimulant that can be addictive if used incorrectly, and ADHD is not understood well enough to know that it is best treated by Adderall alone.
While neuroscientists, pharmacists, etc. may be able to tell you details about ADHD or Adderall, they aren't generally licensed to write prescriptions for Adderall in the U.S., and shouldn't be telling you start, stop, or change your Adderall dosage without consulting with your prescribing doctor first.
Lots of "certified professional" Java/SAP/etc programmers cannot write any code outside an IDE or without context help, leave alone implement simple algorithms like quicksort or basic functions for binary search trees.
Starting on Aderall has changed my life. I am able to concentrate on work, I get more done, I feel calmer, it is almost as if a fog has been lifted and I can clearly see what I am working on. It has been a complete shift, like the difference between day and night.
When I don't take my meds (doctor recommended breaks) I go back to being the old me, I become disorganised, I am constantly distracted and thinking about other things. I lose focus and space out. I don't like that person, because I feel like I don't accomplish anything :-(.