I'm Coming Back

After more than a year's hiatus, I am back. This year has been difficult and remarkable, and I want to share parts of that, because I wish I had had someone else whose experiences reflected mine. The two postcards here are from Post Secret. I don't know who wrote them, but they will be my jumping off point, my raison d'etre for coming back to this blog.

Every once and a while, I see a secret on the Web site that reminds me of myself, but these two so closely encapsulated my most recent decision to return to grappling with ADD, that I gasped. I am sharing them here and will refer back to them in the near future.

I hope that I can develop this Web site into a real resource for others. Again, please e-mail me at addblog@gmail.com or leave a comment if there is anything you would like to see.

With a year break, I will have to do some promotion to get readers, but I am also going to change the focus of this blog a bit.

Lots more to come.

Stereotypes, Ignorance, and Britney Spears

I have not posted in ages, and I promise to write a substantive post soon. But for now, I just wanted to comment on something that I found ridiculous, offensive, and factually incorrect.

Last week's US Weekly, which granted is not the authoritative source on anything other than photographs of and gossip about celebrities, wrote (emphasis mine):

Days after a judge ruled that Britney Spears could only spend three days a week with her children, she reacted by leaving her two kids in a parked car with a court-appointed monitor (whose job description does not include babysitting) as she shopped for $18,200 worth of chandeliers at the Crystal Place design shop near L.A. November 4.

Why does Spears, 25 — even after having physical custody of her kids taken away — keep exhibiting such questionable parenting skills?

Sources say the troubled pop star does not seem to grasp the gravity of her custody case, and they blame her bizarre public behavior (swapping clothes with a stranger, among her recent moves) on psychological issues, not drugs.

“It’s not substance abuse — it’s mental!” a confidante tells Us."Pals suspect adult-onset ADD or depression, with one friend saying, “Postpartum has always been a problem” after giving birth to Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden James, 1."

This is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, it might be true that Spears is dealing with mental illness, but it is unlikely that all of her bad judgment, or even most of it can be attributed to mental illness. The article implies that people with mental illness, people with ADD or depression would be unable to take care of children, or that an imbalance of serotonin or norepinephirine would cause someone to think it was O.K. to trade Halloween costumes with the bartender. I am not a doctor -- and it should be noted that Spears' friends and US Weekly sources are not doctors either--but I am pretty sure that that's pretty unlikely.

Secondly, and this is what caught my eye in the first place, there isn't really such a thing as "adult-onset ADD".

According to the DSM It is essential that "some hyperactive-impulsive or inattentive symptoms that caused impairment were present before age 7 years. As Doctors Glenn Brynes Carol Watkins, of Northern County Psychiatric Associates in Baltimore wrote, "By definition, AD/HD is a condition that has its onset in childhood."

It's great that Spears' friends -- or so called friends since they are dishing to magazines instead of getting her help--are concerned, but US Weekly perpetuates all sorts of falsehoods and stereotypes by printing these guesses. All that would have been needed to fix it was one line from a doctor explaining what was and what was not possible. Maybe this week's cover story on Spears' childhood will reveal a long-time struggle with ADD. Maybe. I am not holding my breath.

I am all for celebrities with ADD or any other disorder talking about it to raise awareness and to educate people. But spreading ignorance and perpetuating stereotypes? It doesn't make dealing and living with ADD any easier for those who have it. Even US Weekly should do better than that. Or for a magazine as widely read as US, maybe I should say especially US Weekly.

News For Thought

This New York Times Magazine article, "Self Non-Medication," is one of the best examples of science journalism I have seen in quite some time. It is a personal story of a man trying to go off of depression medicine, which I should note is not at all necessarily reflective of ADD medicine. What is great is the mix of personal and science. It is an interesting look at the quesiton of taking medicine, though admittedly for a different disorder.

It's a bit long but well worth the read.

Enjoy.

A Preliminary, Personal Decision

Part 1 in a series on medicine and the thought processes that go into deciding to take it.

It's been a while since I wrote a post here and even longer since I wrote a post of substance. So here goes. A lot of the books I have been using are sitting in a box in my parents' house, so I am going to try my best to write about medicine without the books and will write an updated or new post when I unpack that box. Because it seems I have a lot to say, this post will just be about deciding whether or not to take medication and later posts will cover the options. I'm trying out this bolding key sentences style as a way of breaking up huge blocks of text.

First off, there is a lot of bad information on the Internet. By bad I mean either patently false or very biased. There are people who don't believe in taking medication ever, there are those who don't believe that Attention Deficit Disorder is in fact a disorder and therefore don't believe in treating it, and there are people who are paid by drug companies to promote specific drugs. Know that and do not self medicate. It's not worth the risks, and even with the medicine that says there are "no side effects" there can still be side effects because each person reacts to medication differently (I had horrible side effects with a med I tried, even after being assured by a top doctor that side effects with that medicine were extremely rare) and there are ALWAYS risks if you are self-medicating.

I firmly believe that the decision about taking medication for ADD is an extremely personal decision, one that should be made with your doctor and whoever else you choose to consult. No one else, not even if you are still on your parents' health insurance, should be allowed to weigh in without your consent. (Keep in mind, this is a blog directed at adults with ADD, it might be different when the person in question is a small child, but I am not commenting at all here about medicating children. That's a whole different discussion that does not have a place on this blog). For that reason, I will not write here anything about whether or not I am currently taking medicine or which ones, if any, I am taking.

When I first considered whether or not to take medicine, my primary concern was that my personality would change. I didn't want to lose the speed at which I talk, the sharpness of my sarcasm, my ability to be interested in multiple conversations and topics at once, or my creativity. That's not to say that there is any medicine for ADD or ADHD out there that does that, but there were things I was worried about. I had heard descriptions of high-schoolers complaining that their friends were so much more fun -- funny, loud, all around goofy and more active--when they didn't take their medication. And I didn't want that to be me, even though I had been told by more than one doctor that those effects were common in people who have the hyperactive subset and in children, neither of which I was, I was still nervous. But this quote of a mother describing her child on medication : "She's still my dreamer, but now it's on purpose that she dreams" (Hallowell, 40). In short, the medication didn't stop her ability to dream, only let her choose when to do it.

When I considered taking medication, I decided that I would tell a few very close friends, friends who knew me very well and would see me in varying situations. These would be the only people I would tell at first--three or four people total--and I would let them know that I expected them to be honest with me. Did I seem less distracted? Was the change noticeable? Was the change positive? Were there personality differences? Were there things that were missing, and if so were those things that they were glad to see go (like, walking into the middle of the street with out looking, temper bursts, too much anxiety) or quirks that were part of who I am?

Pay attention to things that irk other people. Are those things that you want to change about yourself? Are those things that medicine could help you change?

One more thing to think about: You should be able to tell if the medicine is having an effect, so with people with more mild forms of ADD or ADHD, you might want to take your environment into account. About to leave school and start a job? Switching from one job to another? About to go on vacation? Do you want the extra boost (and I mean this in an entirely positive, way. Taking ADD medicine is not cheating or giving you an unfair leg up. It's leveling the playing field) as you start a new job, or are the demands on your attention so different that you need to be able to see what lack of attention feels like before you can decide if it needs to be remedied? In other words, are you going to be able to tell what changes are caused by medicine and what are caused by a new environment? Is that something that you are concerned about?

This post is full of questions, many of which people might want to bring to the doctor who is prescribing the medicine, but they are also questions to ask yourself, because as I said before and will say again, taking medicine should be an informed, safe, and intensely personal decision.

NEXT: On the different medicines. What is out there? What are the differences?

Comic Relief

Today's theme--and hopefully I can keep them on my site this time--is missing deadlines. In some careers, missing a deadline can be a death sentence, but it happens to the best of us every once and a while, and apparently to the smartest of us. At least according to this recent column in the Washington Post.

"A local organization is eager to give out some scholarship money, but its members dozed on the deadline to be included in the publicity done by the national group. Having missed the cutoff, they were afraid no one would know about the $3,000 that's burning a hole in their pocket.
The group that missed the deadline: Mensa.
That's the organization for geniuses."

A word of warning: I am not, I repeat NOT including this to say that people who are geniuses have ADD or vice versa, or even that all people with ADD miss deadlines, just that the column made me laugh. Take a look at the headline: "Even Geniuses Miss Deadlines . . . And Frolic Nude" and tell me you're not smiling. I will pontificate on giftedness and ADD in a bit. But for now, a comic strip from Bill Amend, the writer of Foxtrot when he was nearing retirement from his daily strip:

Some Personal Thoughts

This blog was designed to provide information but I think it's also important to provide personal reactions so that when other people read it it might resonate with people who are dealing with ADD, testing, or diagnosis. So here are some personal thoughts. They are from a longer essay, edited for legnth and identifying features. That's why it sounds disjointed.

I am part of a growing number of students and adults who are diagnosed post-childhood because, growing up, they were the academic super-stars, popular, and more or less well behaved. Their symptoms were overlooked when they were children because they seemed to fare well without medication or therapy.

The first time I remember having a panic attack was in fourth grade. I didn’t call it that. I didn’t call it that until I was a junior in college. But when I was nine, I had the test the next day on the digestive system, and I didn’t feel prepared so I burst into tears, the big back-shaking kind, with liquid coming from everywhere, eyes, nose, mouth. I don’t remember what my mom said. I do remember that she came into my room later that night and took the diagrams of the stomach and intestines and the flashlight from under my blankets. I got an 103 on the test. No one worried, because when the tears dried I was an overachiever....

On the molecular level, Speed—the blanket name given to a group of drugs that produce the stimulant effect—and Adderall are the same drug. Both are Amphetamines—the title that is given collectively to an assortment of drugs with similar molecular structures including Meth, which can be made illegally in secret laboratories. Amphetamines, legal or illegal can be taken orally, or through injection, smoking, or snorting and create the same rush.

When I nervously asked a psychiatrist counseling center what the difference was between Speed and Adderall, he said, “nothing. Molecularly, they are the same. The difference is how you take them. Adderall is prescribed in small, controlled doses.” The illegal counterparts of the drug clearly are not.

It’s of little surprise then, that Adderall is easy to get on college campuses. Students, some joking some not, beg for it when they are faced with pulling an all-nighter. Other students use it as a party drug.

“I snort it sometimes when I'm going out for fun, because it hits you faster if you snort it,” an NYU student identified only as Mary told The Washington Square News.

When I told a friend via an instant message chat that I wasn’t sure if I was going to get a prescription for Adderall, he wrote “WHAT!?!??!...but like, it's speed.”

Which is exactly why I didn’t want to take it. Edward Hallowell, a physiatrist who has ADD himself, treats it and has written multiple books about the subject, listed “[t]endency towards addictive behavior,” as a symptom of adult ADD in his book Driven to Distraction. Later in the book, Hallowell, describing high stimulation ADD, a specific subset of Adult ADD, “he—and it is usually a he—may seek high stimulation through relatively safe avenues [such as] creating tight deadlines to work under.”

I don’t know if I have high-stimulation ADD. I don’t fit all of the descriptors and I am not a risk taker in the most widely accepted form it takes. I am afraid of roller coasters and skiing. But I am addicted to deadlines. Ask the person who sits next to me in the library. I hate the exhaustion that comes with writing on tight deadlines. But I love the rush that comes with them.

I have a tendency to addiction—my dependency of coffee indicates that much. So I am afraid of prescription medication.

News For Thought

Hopefully a reoccurring post with interesting newspaper articles.

I do not have ADD linked with any other disorder. But, because I would like this to be a resource for other people, and because ADD is often linked with anxiety and depression, and because of the recent events at Virginia Tech, I wanted to provide links to two articles that I thought were interesting approaches to mental health.

First from the New York Times, a story about the woman who started the mental health awareness group, Active Minds, after her brother committed suicide while on leave from college.

And, from the Washington Post an Op-Ed that I link to because of the questions of stigma that it brings up, about the panel being formed in the wake of Virginia Tech.