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Is it any surprise people get apprehensive about stopping medication? We don’t ask people to not use prescription glasses or leave their wheelchair at home and

by mtsr 4y ago

Is it any surprise people get apprehensive about stopping medication? We don’t ask people to not use prescription glasses or leave their wheelchair at home and expect them to be happy about it, do we?

californical 4y ago
You keep saying this throughout the thread. These are fundamentally different, as someone with both conditions and both prescriptions. There is no side-effect to glasses, you can put them on or off completely at-will any moment, and they make a very exact correction to one specific parameter (vision focusing ability). ADHD meds are imprecise and affect many systems in different ways - some positive and some negative. You can only have them on/off daily. It might affect you differently depending on other factors. And treatment is not without risk. It’s hard to understand how stopping will affect you due to the imprecision. It’s not as black-and-white as glasses.
- mtsr 4y ago
  Absolutely. And that’s something that any good doctor will discuss and monitor. And generally medication is combined with other treatments like CBT to learn to cope better, because medication doesn’t magically fix people. But stimulant meds still don’t deserve any more stigma than glasses. For those who take it as part of treatment of a lifelong disability. Edited to add: Btw, try playing squash or go swimming with kids. Suddenly your glasses aren’t the perfect solution that they may otherwise seem to be and they become yet another tool, like having the kids wearing bright swimming clothes so you can spot them in a crowd. But you’re right, we’d love for ADHD meds to be as effective and universal as glasses, but they’re not. Probably because ADHD isn’t a single condition, but a spectrum of conditions with some overlap. So expecting a single treatment to take away all symptoms is a fantasy.

by mtsr 4y ago

californical 4y ago

You keep saying this throughout the thread. These are fundamentally different, as someone with both conditions and both prescriptions. There is no side-effect to glasses, you can put them on or off completely at-will any moment, and they make a very exact correction to one specific parameter (vision focusing ability). ADHD meds are imprecise and affect many systems in different ways - some positive and some negative. You can only have them on/off daily. It might affect you differently depending on other factors. And treatment is not without risk. It’s hard to understand how stopping will affect you due to the imprecision. It’s not as black-and-white as glasses.

mtsr 4y ago
Absolutely. And that’s something that any good doctor will discuss and monitor. And generally medication is combined with other treatments like CBT to learn to cope better, because medication doesn’t magically fix people. But stimulant meds still don’t deserve any more stigma than glasses. For those who take it as part of treatment of a lifelong disability. Edited to add: Btw, try playing squash or go swimming with kids. Suddenly your glasses aren’t the perfect solution that they may otherwise seem to be and they become yet another tool, like having the kids wearing bright swimming clothes so you can spot them in a crowd. But you’re right, we’d love for ADHD meds to be as effective and universal as glasses, but they’re not. Probably because ADHD isn’t a single condition, but a spectrum of conditions with some overlap. So expecting a single treatment to take away all symptoms is a fantasy.