In other news

[commodorified]

So this is why at the tender age of 40-odd I started taking amphetamines.

Oddly, I WAS diagnosed as a child. I was also overmedicated, in retrospect—you know what, it was the 70s and from all I can find out everyone on Ritalin was getting too much of the stuff; I don't even know my exact dosage but it was 4-6 Ritalin/day—which led to a 30-year refusal to try again, and also, probably to my benefit, a life-long wariness of recreational drugs, on the grounds that if my experience of speed was so very very different from what other people described, I was not interested in finding out what happened if I took, say, psychedelics.


This is my brain on drugs, probably. If this were a spinning .gif with the saturation hiked up and the goat sheep invoking ancient gods.

"...[G]irls’ symptoms include:

a tendency toward daydreaming
trouble following instructions
making careless mistakes on homework and tests."

Oh man, so you know how I turned into such a good proofreader? ABJECT TERROR. Which is NOT the way to develop a life skill, really.

Most of the things I'm really good at I acquired through a combination of a) hyperfocus and b) fear of being screamed at.

Comments

[recessional]

IIRC, part of the overmedicating was trying to get the effects to LAST, prior to them figuring out Long Acting and then Extended Release formulas. I remember they were still struggling with that when my cousin was young, in the eighties, because yeah, he was on three to five a day; he hated it for how it made him feel, while at the same time the difference in behaviour was SO MARKED that you could tell that the important effects were wearing off after about four hours . . . but just because the focus-effects were wearing off didn't mean that the actual whole dose was wearing off, you know?

And of course the too-high amount was standard dosage guidelines, so it was just a mess. First the Ritalin LA and then Concerta have made a biiiiig difference. It's actually kind of fascinating how pharmacology knowledge has changed.

[commodorified]

Well, that's it - I'm not holding grudges, because what I was on was the best available treatment at the time. The best available treatment just wasn't very good.

[recessional]

Yeeeeah. It sucks when that happens. And the legacy of it also sucks, because I know a lot of people my age and younger STILL who have that image of treatment in their heads, and either don't look for it when they need it, or go on about how Awful Meds Are and create that wonderful culture of anti-medication.

(Medication isn't right for Everyone Everytime obviously and etc - but especially with the ADHD stuff I've seen the right dose almost seem to be magic in terms of what people can suddenly do. I mean then the honey-moon period ends and one has to deal with the accumulated crap of years of trying to limp through etc etc, but still.)

[commodorified]

To be fair, I was having to deal wth the messed-up legacy issues already, so there's that. :-/

[mmegaera]

That's how I feel about the braces I endured as a kid that messed my jaw up permanently, alas.