Stories of an ADD Adult

I’ve been off the Ritalin for two months now. I get distracted like crazy and often just can’t get myself to work.

I have been unbelievably creative, though. I have been painting and making things during every free moment. I never realized that I had such a strong creative spark. I wonder if I am more creative now than I was before I had taken any meds.

I keep starting new projects and leaving everything unfinished, but I feel more comfortable with it now.

Is brand-name medication the same as the generic “equivalent”? Based on my experiences, there is a huge difference. Many doctors, pharmacists, employers, and insurance plans are skeptical without good reason, in the same way that some people don’t believe that PMS really exists.

I am currently taking brand-name Ritalin. My doctor switched me to it several months ago, after being on generic methylphenidate HCl (methylin) for a long time.

In my experience, the generic version was much stronger and harsher than the brand-name one. I am 100% sure that I would be able to tell the difference if I were blindfolded.

Generic methylphenidate HCL was great at helping me concentrate. But it made me jittery, as if I had taken a few shots of espresso. As soon as I would take the medicine, the effect was immediate and strong.

The comedown was also very noticeable. I could tell very clearly when the methylin was wearing down. I would suddenly feel extremely spacey. My mind would be extremely foggy, beyond how it normally is if I’m not on any medication.

I switched to brand-name Ritalin because I was starting to get scared that the methylphedidate HCl was making my concentration worse. My psychiatrist didn’t know much about the differences between the brand name and the generic versions, but, lucky for me, my psychologist had read a lot about it. He told me that my concentration probably wasn’t becoming worse, but that if I was worried about the starting and ending effects being too strong, that brand name Ritalin might be better for me.

He told my psychiatrist about it, and I made the change immediately. I noticed right away that my psychologist was absolutely right. The brand-name Ritalin had a much milder, sloping starting effect, and a gentler comedown. I also felt less jittery and edgy.

I’m just an ADD sufferer/mental patient, so please don’t take this as official medical advice. Remember that I’m not a doctor, and that if you want to switch you should talk to your own doctor.

You might want to do some research online or at the library before asking your doctor, just in case he or she is skeptical. I’ll try to find some articles about this and post links here, when I get a chance.

Sometimes it feels like time is warped. My mind starts to wander away from my work, and the next thing I know, half an hour or more has already passed.

The effect is exaggerated when I have the internet at my disposal, ready to distract me at any moment. If I stop to look something up online, before I know it, I’ve spent half a day surfing the web.

I feel like my mind travels to outer space and back.

The web surfing example I mentioned is probably pretty common for people with and without ADD. I’m sure people without ADD would also say that their minds wander sometimes. But I feel like without medication, my mind is foggy and spaced out during 90% of the day.

I am tired of reading news stories about college kids staying up all night on ADHD drugs. I am sick of hearing about it on TV as well.

There is so much attention given to the abuse of stimulant medication. The media just loves these types of stories. They love scandals, and they love being the heroes who expose the wrongs of our society.

Unfortunately, most people listen to these types of news stories without really understanding the full issue. People think of medications such as Ritalin and Adderall as overprescribed drugs that are abused by college students, rather than as real medications that actually do help so many college students pay attention in lectures and maintain good enough grades to graduate.

My concentration was improved for about two and a half hours since taking the generic Sudafed. It’s now back to the way it usually is, where I can’t focus on anything.

My sinuses are feeling much better, at least. I can even breathe through my nose a little.

I guess that’s why pseudoephedrine isn’t suggested by doctors as a treatment for ADD or ADHD. It works a little, but it doesn’t last very long. It might also be bad for you to take it constantly, possibly. That’s just a theory; I don’t know for sure.

About 45 minutes ago, I took some cold medicine to help with my stuffy nose and sinuses. It was just over-the-counter medicine: Target brand “Non-Drying Sinus”, which is the generic equivalent of Sudafed Non-Drying Sinus.

I noticed that it actually did help with my concentration a little. I was able to write a couple of posts without too much distraction (though I did get distracted here and there).

Looking on the back of the package, the active ingredients in each liquid cap are:

• Guaifenesin 200 mg
• Pseudoephedrine HCl 30 mg

Aha, so the pseudoephedrine is what’s helping me concentrate. It’s a mild stimulant, I believe, and it’s in cold medicine because it dries out the sinuses. The guaifenesin is supposed to be what makes the congestion more fluid and liquid, like the effect when you eat spicy foods or chicken soup.

I took 2 capsules as recommended on the back of the box, so I’m on a normal dose. I am somewhat surprised that it improved my concentration, seeing as from my entry a little while ago, I didn’t think anything could help me concentrate because I am feeling so sick.

The sinus medicine also contains FD&C blue #1 granular, which annoys me because I have tried so hard to stay away from all artificial colors in my diet. I guess that the stimulant effect overpowers the artificial coloring effect.

I will keep track of when the effect goes away and post it here, if I can remember to post.

I have been feeling sick with the flu for the past few days. Last night, I slept for eleven and a half hours straight, which is out of the ordinary for me. I’ve been so tired.

Having the flu makes it extremely difficult to get work done, for anyone. It makes your head so foggy, so you just cannot concentrate no matter whether you’ve had coffee (or taken your ADD meds). It is like having double ADD if you already have ADD.

My stomach has been turning too, making it even more difficult for me to want to take my supplements or eat anything. But it’s good to do both so I should probably fight my feelings and fears.

I believe that childhood ADHD may very well be overdiagnosed. However, adult ADD is another matter altogether.

In my mind there are two main groups of people who get diagnosed with adult ADD. The first group consists of adults who had the ADHD diagnosis when they were children and are now grown up. They are the ones who didn’t outgrow their diagnosis. That is, they are the ones who genuinely suffered from ADHD as children and were more likely not to be part of the overdiagnosis trend.

The second group consists of adults who have been hearing about ADHD and adult ADD in the news, in magazines, and in commercials. They see it on TV or read the articles and say to themselves, “Hey, that’s me! That describes exactly how I’ve suffered all these years.” They then go online to find whatever other information they can find about adult ADD, including this website if they are lucky. They really do their research well, and if they are sure that they fit the symptoms, only then do they see a doctor about their problems.

Like the second group of adults, the first group is also extremely knowledgeable about ADHD and ADD, due to all the years of being labeled with the disorder. They know all the details by heart, both because they have gone through therapy and because they have been reading about ADHD and ADD for years and years.

Anyhow, both groups of adults have one thing in common: they themselves identify with the adult ADD diagnosis, including most or all of the symptoms, and they feel comfortable that it’s not a misdiagnosis. They have done their research. They differ from the children who get diagnosed with AD(H)D in that not all of those children can comfortably say that they identify with all of the expected symptoms. Many of those children have the diagnosis imposed upon them by a teacher, school administrator, doctor, or parent. Few children received the AD(H)D diagnosis only after doing their own independent research (though it may be true in some cases).

Self-diagnosis is probably quite accurate in the case of ADD. The symptoms are pretty simple to understand, and you either relate to most or all of them, or you don’t. Since the majority of adults with ADD either self-diagnosed themselves or are sure that their symptoms from childhood are real and have carried over into adulthood, the diagnosis is probably accurate for most ADD adults.

Furthermore, doctors tend to be especially careful in prescribing ADD medications to adults. Adults are also the ones who abuse these controlled medications, so doctors know to take the extra effort and care to be sure that the adult ADD diagnosis is correct.

Based on all these facts, adult ADD must not be overdiagnosed. It is a completely different scenario from childhood ADHD, which has great potential for overdiagnosis.

I had left a needle on top of a piece of fabric, in the middle of my living room. I was thinking that I would pick it up later.

And now it’s gone. It is lost somewhere in the fibers of my carpet. I know I will find it sometime soon by accident, walking around the house barefoot. It will hurt.

That was a dumb decision for me to make. I have realized that having ADD makes you do dumb things sometimes. I was going to pick up the needle, but I got distracted and decided I would do it later.

Distractions. They make it so easy to do regrettable things. I would never have done something like this had I taken my medication. I also might not have slept so well, on the other hand.

I don’t have any children right now.

But when the time comes for me to have children, one of my biggest fears is that they will suffer from ADHD.

I am definitely not ready to have children because I don’t know what I would do when they received the diagnosis. Would I take them to a psychiatrist early in life and have them go through therapy? Would I subject their developing little brains to harsh stimulant medication?

I do know that I would try to spend as much time with them as possible. I would want to give them every possible advantage of having a loving parent to help them with their classwork and homework.

I would buy many educational toys to help them with their concentration and memory. I would give them all the art supplies they wanted in order to encourage their creative thinking.

I guess I probably wouldn’t medicate them until they reached late high school or college. It would break my heart to see them struggle through school the way I did, though, so I don’t know if I could sit back and watch them suffer with their illness, knowing that medication existed and was available.

I knew I wasn’t normal when I was young, although I didn’t know what ADHD was until I was in middle or high school. Therapy might help my children understand the differences in their brains, but having the ADHD label might hurt their self-esteem.

Until I have a better idea of what I would do for my kids, I will not have children. I am not ready to bring up children and watch them suffer in the same way that I have always suffered.

I can’t believe I’ve been able to keep up this blog for so long. I start so many projects but have a hard time keeping up my interest in each one for more than part of a day.

My house is a mess because there are materials from unfinished projects all over the place. I rarely wrap up my work and clean up when I’m done working on a project.

Instead, what determines whether or not I am done with a project is distraction. It may be in the form of another project that I’m in the middle of, starting a new project or task, or even just wandering off. When I get distracted, that’s the end of whatever work I had been doing previously.

I don’t like being distracted from projects, and I try not to get distracted. I try to see how much I’ve accomplished every five minutes in order to keep me on task.

Inevitably I end up getting distracted and beginning something else. It happens every 10-15 minutes when I let myself work on projects without paying attention to the clock, and every half an hour when I’m conscious of time.

I was watching one of the Strattera videos where they mentioned this exact problem with focusing on projects. That’s what inspired this post, really.

Strattera is one medication that I have never taken. It really does sound promising, because I’ve always worried about the fact that Ritalin is a stimulant.

I guess it just would feel better not to be taking a medication that has so much stigma. I am trying to think of other reasons, but I can’t really come up with any right now.

I always feel like I have to hide my Ritalin when I take it. I take it in the bathroom, where no one’s looking, or at home in private, but I do everything to hide the prescription bottle in my purse when I’m in public. I don’t want anyone to know. I’m also scared because people use Ritalin as a drug, and if others knew I had it, they might try to steal tablets or something.

Maybe that’s just paranoia. I don’t know.

I think I would probably do the same with Strattera, but I wouldn’t feel so worried about carrying it around with me. As far as I know, people don’t use it as a drug. My guess about this is that since it often takes 4-6 weeks to feel the resulting effects, people who want to use it actually get a prescription the honest way and actually do need it for real reasons.

People looking to get high probably wouldn’t get anything out of Strattera, I would imagine.

I was talking to a friend of my mother’s who happens to be a pediatrician. She regularly prescribes ADHD medications to her young patients. She was saying that it’s sad how so many parents insist that their kids be given a prescription immediately, rather than trying to examine and change other factors first.

I agreed that too many parents try and take the easy way out of solving their children’s problems with medicine. But I also told her that I was a patient myself, and that I was taking Ritalin. I told her that it had helped me tremendously.

She said that if it’s what helps, that it’s good to take the medication. She clarified her words right away, saying that there were children who justifiably needed meds to treat their ADHD, but that there were too many other kids who needed more personal attention from teachers and parents first before resorting to prescriptions.

Children with ADD/ADHD and adults with ADD are pretty similar. This is probably surprising to most people, including doctors, but it isn’t surprising to those of us who are adults and who have suffered from ADD/ADHD throughout our own lives.

It seems hard to believe that the adult ADD diagnosis is so new. I can’t imagine how doctors and researchers could have believed for years and years that all children with ADHD would grow out of the illness by the time they reached adulthood. To me, that’s completely absurd.

You can’t just suddenly wake up one day and discover that your concentration and attention span are suddenly normal. It takes practice, coaching, and/or medication to get to the point of being normal.

I always hoped that one day I would grow out of my restlessness and lack of focus. Once I knew about childhood ADD, I was sure that my symptoms would be gone by the time I was an adult. I was sad to discover that the myth wasn’t true.

Yesterday I had to drive to an appointment. My mind was feeling cloudy, and I knew I would have trouble watching the road, so I took one of my Ritalin tablets. I’ve been trying to avoid taking Ritalin, but in this case I knew the risk of having an accident was too strong.

I swallowed the little tablet before leaving home. Then I drove off. I noticed that while my concentration was improved in a much smoother way than it had been the previous day, when I had drank a cup of coffee containing a high dose of caffeine.

Since I haven’t been taking much of my Ritalin lately, I figured that only one tablet would be enough. And I was right today. It boosted my concentration just enough to help without overpowering my own abilities. It was sort of like having training wheels.

I felt pretty confident while driving and did not come anywhere near having an accident. Which is the opposite of what happens when I don’t take Ritalin or anything else before driving! Usually I have a few “close calls” and almost end up hitting someone, only to be saved by my very quick reflexes.

Today I drank a small cup of strong cappucino at an Italian coffee shop. It must have had much more caffeine than an ordinary cup.

I had to drive home after going to the coffee shop, which was far away. I was worried about driving because I hadn’t taken my Ritalin, but it turned out not to be a big problem.

I concentrated pretty well while driving home. I felt a little weird because the coffee was so strong, but I could definitely concentrate. It was sort of like being on Ritalin, but it felt stronger and rougher.

It’s odd how caffeine can be stronger than Ritalin sometimes, yet Ritalin requires a prescription and coffee can be bought anywhere, even in places other than pharmacies.

I am starting to see ads all over the web about buying Ritalin online. Sometimes I even see those ads here!

It really confuses me. I didn’t think you could buy Ritalin without a prescription. Is it not highly controlled and regulated?

I do wish that Ritalin was a normal, over-the-counter medication. I wish it was potent enough to help people with ADD and ADHD, but not so potent that kids could consume it in large quantities to get high. Having it available over the counter without a prescription would probably reduce the stigma of using it.

After all, cough syrup can be bought without a prescription, and it is abusable, but buying it at the pharmacy does not raise any eyebrows.

I have really been struggling with my vitamin + fish oil plan, because I keep forgetting to take my pills.

With stimulants it was much easier to remember to take them. Honestly it was because of the instant gratification. I knew that if I took my Ritalin, I would experience a noticeable improvement in my concetration within the next hour.

With vitamins and fish oil, it seems like you have to take them for a longer-term period in order to experience the improvement in concentration. Don’t take my word completely, because I’ve never been able to take the supplements long enough to experience the long-term benefits.

It’s the vicious ADD cycle. If I forget to take my meds, I can’t concentrate. If I’m distracted by lots of things, I will inevitably forget to take my meds. And without the instant feedback that stimulants have, taking vitamins and fish oil isn’t easy.

Concerta was the name of the medication that the doctor prescribed for me. I had never heard of it, but then again I was never the type of person who talked about medications with friends or who trusted the media and the Internet for health-related info.

The first time I went to pick up my medicine at the pharmacy, it was nerve-wracking. I was terrified that I might run into someone that I knew. Living in a closed little suburb, you tend to run into people you know wherever you go.

I didn’t want anyone to know that I was picking up a prescription for ADD medication. I was afraid that people would think I was a stimulant-abuser, a druggie. I was afraid that even the pharmacist would think that.

I knew it would help me, though, so the same day I found the courage to pick up my Concerta. I was relieved to find that there was no one else my age there at the pharmacy. The other people in line were elderly ladies, and I told myself that they probably didn’t know what Concerta was anyway, or even what ADD was.

Adderall was banned earlier this year in Canada.

It is a shame that stimulants can be abused, because they help so many people so greatly. Every time I hear a story about college students abusing Ritalin or Adderall, it makes me very angry. It makes it more difficult for the people who really need the medications to have them.

The real people who suffer are those who need it for driving, and for work. A wonder drug like Adderall can help a person pull himself or herself together enough to go out and find a job, and then to hold the job steadily. That tends to be the fate of wonder drugs; they are so helpful that people who don’t need them start abusing them, and then the wonder drugs get banned for everyone.

If I depended on Adderall but lived in Canada, the ban would be enough to make me move to the United States.

Many of the supplements that are supposed to help you concentrate consist of fatty acids, including fish oil.

For example, this one:

“Learning Factors School-Aid” lists tuna oil as the second ingredient. It lists a bunch of other ingredients too, which is why I won’t take an ADD/ADHD supplement like this one at the moment. Although I trust my Centrum multivitamins, I don’t want to take something specifically for improving focus that has so many ingredients. Because then how will I figure out which ingredients are working, and which are just filler?

Feel free to post a comment if you’ve had any success with these types of supplements. I want to know!

Okay, something drastic is happening. For the next several weeks I am going to try taking the following supplements:

• 1 Centrum multivitamin
• 1 tablet of vitamin B-6, daily
• 1 fish oil capsule, three times a day

I am also going to try taking time off from my Ritalin. The reason is that I’ve noticed a decline in my memory. I used to have an amazing, almost photographic memory, but over the past few years I haven’t been able to remember details as well. If my memory improves with this experiment, I might not go back to using Ritalin or other stimulant medications again.

Just as a disclaimer: don’t try this at home, and this is not meant to be medical advice for anyone!

For the longest time, I didn’t have the courage to see a doctor about my concentration problems.

Then I became desperate. I started failing my classes. The funny thing is, I was trying harder than ever to pass them. While my friends went out and enjoyed a normal social life, I stayed in to catch up with work.

Nobody understood. They all thought I was a straight-A student who spent all her time worrying about grades needlessly. They never understood that I just wanted to pass my classes so that I wouldn’t get kicked out of school.

I was struggling so much that finally I gave in and walked into the doctor’s office. He agreed that all my symptoms pointed to ADD and suggested some books about it. He gave me a prescription, which I was embarrassed to use but which helped me significantly. And then my life began to improve.

I saw an advertisement on TV just now for Focus Factor. Apparently it’s a supplement you can buy at any drugstore or online without a prescription, and it’s supposed to help you focus.

Sounds like a stimulant. Well, let me know if you have used it, and whether it has helped you. I am curious to hear about your experiences!

I am probably the most understanding person in the world when it comes to ADD and ADHD, so don’t worry. You can email me privately at cassandra@addadult.org if that’s easier for you.

Most of my friends got their driver’s licenses the day they turned sixteen, or soon after. Definitely by seventeen, at least.

I, on the other hand, waited until I was 23. I had wanted to get my license sooner, but I was afraid because my concentration was so bad. It seemed like I would never be able to drive because I just didn’t have the focus and attention span for it.

I finally had to get my driver’s license when I was 23, because I was out of college and looking for a job. I needed to be able to drive myself to job interviews. It was terrifying to drive, but at least my medication helped.