6 ms·

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 an

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 ... for me it isn't. Without my meds I wouldn't be able to concentrate, I wouldn't be able to get work done. At one point it got so bad at work that I was afraid I was going to get fired since I couldn't focus on any single task at hand at all. 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 :-(.

linohh 13y ago
What many people don't understand is the stress people with ADD are exposed to. Especially when they're smart. 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.
- dualboot 13y ago
  This is one of the most succinct explanations of what my life was like before medication and after. Thank you!
- reneherse 13y ago
  Wow, this sounds exactly like what I've been experiencing for the last four to five years. Even the misdiagnosis, which have mostly turned me off from seeking any kind of mental health treatment. Can you recommend how to screen for a competent psychiatrist specializing in adult ADD?
  - stevewillows 13y ago
    I live in Vancouver and have had the best success working directly through the local hospital's mental health group. The key is to do a lot of testing. I've also found pink noise to help quite a bit in those times where I need an extra bit of focus. 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. :)
    - doktrin 13y ago
      > 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.
      - stevewillows 13y ago
        It's mainly for the depression - - but I've found since starting the medication that I've been able to focus far better than before. There are some studies around where they tested this drug for ADHD with kids. 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.
        stevewillows 13y ago
        To add to this; If any of you with ADHD have found that you're miraculously killing at Scrabble or Boggle after a few drinks, being on this medication is a similar feeling. It's as if the anxiety or whatever is the noise and the medication filters that out.
- option_greek 13y ago
  Wow, that porsche analogy is so apt. That's exactly how I feel most of the time.
- frozenport 13y ago
  I felt the same way, and in the last few years growing up has done much to shift my brain to the next gear. Once I knew what concentration felt like I was able to recreate that feeling and focus. No medication involved.
  - badclient 13y ago
    Same! I'll take adderall regularly for some time. Then I'll get a decent feel for what it's like to concentrate and am able to do it without it. I don't know what's the scientific justification for what you and I are able to do but I'm glad I'm not the only one :D
    - kristofferR 13y ago
      I doubt I have/had ADHD, but Modafinil did the same for me.
- oftenwrong 13y ago
  >Imagine having a porsche in your driveway, but for reasons you can only use the first gear. 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.
- DavidBradbury 13y ago
  >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. 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.
jessriedel 13y ago
I welcome people constructively criticizing the study, but this kind of anecdotal response is really not useful.
- benjamincburns 13y ago
  I had some trepidation over this when deciding whether or not to post my own anecdotes. In the end I decided that while it's not useful as a criticism of the study it's absolutely useful to curb the conclusion, that ADHD drugs are broadly ineffective, which this presentation of the study might suggest. 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."
  - incongruity 13y ago
    Okay, pick some other metric – the lack of grade improvement starts to cut away at the possible claims for cognitive improvement, on the whole, assuming the science is good. 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.
    - akiselev 13y ago
      Another anecdote but a very applicable one: a fellow nerd in high school had terrible grades, before and after starting Vyvanse (re-patented version of Adderall) around the end of sophomore year. However, he was able to focus in the biochemistry class and despite the fact that he still received bad grades for lack of caring, his medication helped him discover that he loved chemistry. A year later he was accepted to an Ivy League on a 3.0 unweighted GPA because he was able to throw a never before possessed focus at an internship at Caltech where he became a published scientist within a year. 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.
fizzbuzzd 13y ago
When I go and get my ADHD prescription filled, I always get a look of judgement from pharmacy workers. I've struggled with a lot of shit throughout my life that has caused a lot persistent anxiousness that has always made it difficult to focus. I don't know what the exact issue is, but I was physically/sexually abused as a child, had overbearing parents, and so on, so it's hard to correlate just exactly what's behind it. Anxiety went hand and hand with all of this, and coping became harder and harder (I didn't have a girlfriend/sex until much later in life, failing college, etc). Things got real bad in my early twenties, and meds saved my life. I could do my job, and people could see I was good at it. It helped me calm down. It worked for me, and it may not work for everyone, but please leave that option open to the individual and his/her doctor. I was unmedicated most of my life, and still keep it a secret from every single person I know. There's my anecdote.
stackedmidgets 13y ago
Addict.
jt2190 13y ago
> 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... Unless any of those people is a licensed psychiatrist you should ignore them and move on.
- barry-cotter 13y ago
  Indeed because no one who isn't a licensed psychiatrist knows anything about neuroscience, drug mechanisms or interactions, coping strategies, physiology or mechanism. Neuroscientists, pharmacists, biochemists, none of these people could possibly have any relevant expertise. Only licensed psychiatrists are worth listening to.
  - jt2190 13y ago
    As far as telling someone to stop their prescribed medication, then yes, the prescribing physician is the only one to listen to. But perhaps you are expert enough and have enough knowledge about his medical history that he should listen to you instead?
    - barry-cotter 13y ago
      I have 0.01 as much of a problem with this proposition as with your previous one. That is an excellent heuristic for most people to use.
      - jt2190 13y ago
        You created a "previous proposition" where there wasn't one, by not reading my words in context as a reply the parent post (that described a specific scenario wherein the writer's friends were telling him to stop taking the Adderall that was successfully treating his ADHD symptoms) and instead inventing a completely different context for my words. 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.
scotty79 13y ago
How do you know that sugar pill wouldn't bring you same benefits? Were you taking some other smart sounding similarly administered drugs before and you began taking current ones and you observed improvement on switching meds?
zeckalpha 13y ago
Perhaps you actually have ADD/ADHD but most of the kids in the study were misdiagnosed?
loceng 13y ago
During your "doctor recommended breaks" - try doing diet cleanses, elimination diet. Many foods, very common ones - wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, potatoes, almonds, etc - can cause ADD-like thinking through irritation (that you may notice or not) in your intestinal tract, etc.. Then there is also childhood emotion repression that could be a cause to ADD / scattered thinking. Food and past trauma are two things to always look into if someone's having difficulty. I always suggest a good dose of yoga with a regular yoga practice to help with the calming / releasing endorphines, serotonin, etc. - reducing baseline stress levels. Edit: Oh, and also, if you ever had painful ear infections as a child then look into http://www.aitinstitute.org 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).
- dedward 13y ago
  is there any scientific evidence for "cleanses" at all? Because the word "cleanse" sets off my BS detector like crazy.
  - loceng 13y ago
    It just means reviewing and cleaning up your diet and/or giving your digestive system a break - either with a full fast (water only), or limiting what you eat. There are gimmicky cleanses, just like there are gimmicky fitness products, etc..

linohh 13y ago

What many people don't understand is the stress people with ADD are exposed to. Especially when they're smart. 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.

dualboot 13y ago
This is one of the most succinct explanations of what my life was like before medication and after. Thank you!
reneherse 13y ago
Wow, this sounds exactly like what I've been experiencing for the last four to five years. Even the misdiagnosis, which have mostly turned me off from seeking any kind of mental health treatment. Can you recommend how to screen for a competent psychiatrist specializing in adult ADD?
- stevewillows 13y ago
  I live in Vancouver and have had the best success working directly through the local hospital's mental health group. The key is to do a lot of testing. I've also found pink noise to help quite a bit in those times where I need an extra bit of focus. 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. :)
  - doktrin 13y ago
    > 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.
    - stevewillows 13y ago
      It's mainly for the depression - - but I've found since starting the medication that I've been able to focus far better than before. There are some studies around where they tested this drug for ADHD with kids. 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.
      - stevewillows 13y ago
        To add to this; If any of you with ADHD have found that you're miraculously killing at Scrabble or Boggle after a few drinks, being on this medication is a similar feeling. It's as if the anxiety or whatever is the noise and the medication filters that out.
option_greek 13y ago
Wow, that porsche analogy is so apt. That's exactly how I feel most of the time.
frozenport 13y ago
I felt the same way, and in the last few years growing up has done much to shift my brain to the next gear. Once I knew what concentration felt like I was able to recreate that feeling and focus. No medication involved.
- badclient 13y ago
  Same! I'll take adderall regularly for some time. Then I'll get a decent feel for what it's like to concentrate and am able to do it without it. I don't know what's the scientific justification for what you and I are able to do but I'm glad I'm not the only one :D
  - kristofferR 13y ago
    I doubt I have/had ADHD, but Modafinil did the same for me.
oftenwrong 13y ago
>Imagine having a porsche in your driveway, but for reasons you can only use the first gear. 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.
DavidBradbury 13y ago
>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. 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.

jessriedel 13y ago

I welcome people constructively criticizing the study, but this kind of anecdotal response is really not useful.

benjamincburns 13y ago
I had some trepidation over this when deciding whether or not to post my own anecdotes. In the end I decided that while it's not useful as a criticism of the study it's absolutely useful to curb the conclusion, that ADHD drugs are broadly ineffective, which this presentation of the study might suggest. 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."
- incongruity 13y ago
  Okay, pick some other metric – the lack of grade improvement starts to cut away at the possible claims for cognitive improvement, on the whole, assuming the science is good. 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.
  - akiselev 13y ago
    Another anecdote but a very applicable one: a fellow nerd in high school had terrible grades, before and after starting Vyvanse (re-patented version of Adderall) around the end of sophomore year. However, he was able to focus in the biochemistry class and despite the fact that he still received bad grades for lack of caring, his medication helped him discover that he loved chemistry. A year later he was accepted to an Ivy League on a 3.0 unweighted GPA because he was able to throw a never before possessed focus at an internship at Caltech where he became a published scientist within a year. 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.

fizzbuzzd 13y ago

When I go and get my ADHD prescription filled, I always get a look of judgement from pharmacy workers. I've struggled with a lot of shit throughout my life that has caused a lot persistent anxiousness that has always made it difficult to focus. I don't know what the exact issue is, but I was physically/sexually abused as a child, had overbearing parents, and so on, so it's hard to correlate just exactly what's behind it. Anxiety went hand and hand with all of this, and coping became harder and harder (I didn't have a girlfriend/sex until much later in life, failing college, etc). Things got real bad in my early twenties, and meds saved my life. I could do my job, and people could see I was good at it. It helped me calm down. It worked for me, and it may not work for everyone, but please leave that option open to the individual and his/her doctor. I was unmedicated most of my life, and still keep it a secret from every single person I know. There's my anecdote.

stackedmidgets 13y ago

Addict.

jt2190 13y ago

> 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... Unless any of those people is a licensed psychiatrist you should ignore them and move on.

barry-cotter 13y ago
Indeed because no one who isn't a licensed psychiatrist knows anything about neuroscience, drug mechanisms or interactions, coping strategies, physiology or mechanism. Neuroscientists, pharmacists, biochemists, none of these people could possibly have any relevant expertise. Only licensed psychiatrists are worth listening to.
- jt2190 13y ago
  As far as telling someone to stop their prescribed medication, then yes, the prescribing physician is the only one to listen to. But perhaps you are expert enough and have enough knowledge about his medical history that he should listen to you instead?
  - barry-cotter 13y ago
    I have 0.01 as much of a problem with this proposition as with your previous one. That is an excellent heuristic for most people to use.
    - jt2190 13y ago
      You created a "previous proposition" where there wasn't one, by not reading my words in context as a reply the parent post (that described a specific scenario wherein the writer's friends were telling him to stop taking the Adderall that was successfully treating his ADHD symptoms) and instead inventing a completely different context for my words. 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.

scotty79 13y ago

How do you know that sugar pill wouldn't bring you same benefits? Were you taking some other smart sounding similarly administered drugs before and you began taking current ones and you observed improvement on switching meds?

zeckalpha 13y ago

Perhaps you actually have ADD/ADHD but most of the kids in the study were misdiagnosed?

loceng 13y ago

During your "doctor recommended breaks" - try doing diet cleanses, elimination diet. Many foods, very common ones - wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, potatoes, almonds, etc - can cause ADD-like thinking through irritation (that you may notice or not) in your intestinal tract, etc.. Then there is also childhood emotion repression that could be a cause to ADD / scattered thinking. Food and past trauma are two things to always look into if someone's having difficulty. I always suggest a good dose of yoga with a regular yoga practice to help with the calming / releasing endorphines, serotonin, etc. - reducing baseline stress levels. Edit: Oh, and also, if you ever had painful ear infections as a child then look into http://www.aitinstitute.org 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).

dedward 13y ago
is there any scientific evidence for "cleanses" at all? Because the word "cleanse" sets off my BS detector like crazy.
- loceng 13y ago
  It just means reviewing and cleaning up your diet and/or giving your digestive system a break - either with a full fast (water only), or limiting what you eat. There are gimmicky cleanses, just like there are gimmicky fitness products, etc..