I thank God every day for being the exception to the rule. I was diagnosed at 40 and all my challenges with ADHD revolve around areas that impact personal relationships but not work so here I am making 200+ a year but outside of work can’t manage intimate relationships.
Med free though. Tried a few varieties but didn’t help where I needed them to. Biggest fixes I would strongly recommend is exercise which is free and a regular psychologist which is not but so worth it.
I was diagnosed as an adult as well, but I also stopped taking the meds years ago in favor of lifestyle changes. Exercise, sleep, and diet helps enough to get by for me, without the side effects.
My personal opinion is years from now we will look at the drugs we are giving to help with thinks like ADHD as barbarism. Yes I know they help many people including my two sons but doctors will tell you it’s all trial and error. We literally don’t know what we are doing.
But yeah everyone has to weigh their individual risks. For me and you meds aren’t needed but we understand for others they don’t have that luxury.
I got Ritalin at around 11 or so. I’d get home from class on pass out for hours. Anecdotally, Being hyperfocused as a little kid can be extremely exhausting.
I did get it and I’m still not. See also Prozac, Wellbutrin, Ritalin, and Imipramine. Instead I got to be a Bitter INTJ diagnosed with Aspergers in my 30’s
I wasn’t diagnosed until 30, I could have probably had a degree at least. Mean I got halfway back in the day but yeah. High school was so easy I barely had to study, also didn’t help with the work ethic for later. Nowadays I take random online courses sometimes just to learn new stuff. Plus it helps I’m too old to party but is that a factor? I’ll never know. Mm
Ya I got it just in time for my second try at an associates degree and low and behold I got straight A’s this time around. It was a wild difference from my first attempt where I fucked off too hard and dropped out. And now I’m like you and I just learn stuff for fun on the internet.
Crazy to think having a home is something you should need to earn.
I was given adderall as a child and all I got was a lifetime of emotional disregulation and suicidality
I guess I may have jumped the gun in getting my kids diagnosed/prescribed. One responded well, the other not so much.
I was just trying to prevent more misery, divorces, struggle, etc, honest!
I am angry at my parents for putting me on such strong drugs as a child. It gave me serious emotional issues (constant anger and depression) that they completely overlooked because my grades were improving. My parents should have arranged other forms of help for me. Medication is not enough and medication with no other support is harmful to a child, at least it was in my case. People with ADHD need therapy to help them develop methods for regulating their emotions and building executive function.
I’m not saying get your kids off the extremely potent controlled substances, I’m just saying really think about it. Don’t make the mistakes my parents made. It’s impossible to know how much the drugs contributed, but I can tell you that I’ve lived my life in absolute agony with a near total immunity to any form of joy or pleasure. I was robbed of my natural brain development.
They’re not on them anymore. As soon as he said it was making him feel bad, I stopped it. That’s been several years ago now.
What would you say to your younger self?
“One a day of each, white in the morning and blue in the evening” as I hand him a garbage bag of Adderall and Prozac before happily blinking out of existence.
Wait, you take Adderall in the evening?
it’s like Pizza bagels.
TIL there are blue Adderall
TIL there are white, lol
Now I want to try all the flavors
Orange is the best, pretty sure they add sweetener so it can be mixed into juice or something. You can dissolve it under your tongue without such a nasty taste.
Gonna try em all!
Adderall: taste the rainbow!
There’s no way child-me would’ve accepted drugs from a stranger that claimed to be me from the future. I was ADHD, but I wasn’t gullible.
that’s just the D.A.R.E. program talking. Weed is… …just great.
Didn’t everyone decide on a secret codeword so your future self could prove they were really you? Come now, your child self really should have planned for this contingency.
He/She would have to know the name my childhood imaginary horse. I’m not going to post it but they would need to know that.
Horsey? Mr. Ed?
Good guesses! Nope!
For real, missing out on a lot of free drugs for this oversight
Shit, if my future self popped into existence, gave me a bag of drugs and said they would change my life, I wouldn’t even question it. I don’t trust other people, but I trust myself.
and said they would change my life
A garbage bag full of drugs will change your life, but for the better or worse is not really specified
If it’s a true grab bag/assortment, it may well come down to the order in which they come out of the bag.
Well now I guess I don’t have an excuse
I have a house and continuously wish I havent bought it and just lived in a condo.
Lets say if I paid 500k for it, and have fixed it for $250k so far. I’m not getting that money back, ever. This house might be worth maybe $50k more at most.
Still kitchen and two bathroons to be renovated, and the whole house to be painted, and roof to be fixed, and I dont have the time nor money to do those. 2020s suck, I wish I was born 40 years ago.
Why wish you were born 40 years ago when you can wish you were born to a generational wealth family and had like $500K yearly allowance at 12.
Imagine being so rich that you could have things like food, shelter and clean drinking water!
I got Adderall at 7… I was too fucked up by uncontrolled severe anxiety and gender dysphoria to make any positive progress in my life when I was younger, and at 35 I still am.
Yeah, starting estrogen at 20 made it quickly click that it wasn’t that I was lazy that made me barely graduate high school. Thank fuck I started in time to pull up my grades and graduate college. It turns out most people aren’t constantly disassociating starting in middle school. Getting anxiety meds took a few more years after that unfortunately, as did getting cptsd help.
Mind you most of why I don’t own a house is unrelated to all this, but I certainly wouldn’t have spent my 20s with the kind of money stress I did
i still wouldn’t though. growing up in a house, i know its downsides. rural area, no public transport, social isolation, no friends. i’d rather live in an apartment in the city.
This is pretty accurate for me. I started taking Adderall when I turned 43 because my screaming toddler induced ADD rage.
So I went did some research, talked to a therapist and we decided to put me on it. Life is much better now.
All that said, it really upsets me that I was in high school in the mid-90s in rural Tennessee and nobody even understood me or what it would take for me to be successful.
Oh well things are better now and that’s the important thing
Oh man when I got diagnosed with ADHD, in my late 30s, and then got prescribed a stimulant…first adderal, then Vyvanse, and tried concerta, now back to Vyvanse…it was like a light switch.
A sudden realization that holy shit, the light was off the whole damn time. Now I can see what I am doing.
I wish I had it 30 years prior. It’s like playing a challenging game and getting to the midpoint before realizing it was on hard mode all along. Normal mode is still difficult but at least you got some more stamina. Easy mode is only available through pre-release genetic lottery.
I feel roughly the same way about starting GLP-1 receptor agonists. Like…oh…I’m supposed to feel full after a meal? That’s new. Where was that for the past 30 years?
Looking at my kids, who are both on opposite ends of the ADHD spectrum…my oldest, like me, exhibits signs of ADHD-I and is not diagnosed…and my youngest, diagnosed ten seconds after the doctor walked in the room as ADHD-H…and I’m realizing that I’m making the same mistake my generation did in only treating the hyper one.
As long as you don’t plan on visiting Japan, where Adderall is illegal.
