The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves)
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@Rinel They didn't want to put me on regular ADD meds, because I am on an anxiety med. Ask about Wellbutrin? (I am on the generic version) It's not a perfect fix, but it has helped some.
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Thank you. I'll ask.
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@Rinel said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
Well, I've been given some options going forward.
Good news: my psychiatrist is really smart and up to date on all the latest neuropsychiatry and pharmaceutical studies.
Bad news: anxiety and ADHD medicines do not play well together.
By "do not play well together," I mean that benzodiazapenes make ADHD worse by depressing all neural function, including the mesocorticolimbic projection, which is what makes dopamine, well, work as a positive motivator. And ADHD medicines hyperactivate the HPA axis, which regulates stress.
So I get to choose between extreme lack of productivity, which is starting to affect my job performance even if I've managed to keep it hidden from others, and extreme, unrelenting terror that makes life literally unmanageable.
Meanwhile my bosses have literally no idea of what's required for the imminently due deadline, keep telling me to take time off because they're worried about my mental health, and don't have the ability to help me do what needs to be done because they never reviewed any of the materials I sent them weeks ago in order to learn it.
I want to quit everything and cry for a week. The only good news is that I'm so terrified of driving that if I ever actually become suicidal I can just get in the car and go to New Orleans because I'm convinced the constant panic attacks will kill me. Boom. Instant exposure therapy.
Or, you know, death.
It's fine. This is fine. Everything is fine. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
This is not my beautiful house!
Hey- my psych (who is also wonderful) put me on viibryd for anxiety. It's an off-label use of a fairly new drug, but as she explained, they did testing for both depression and anxiety and found that it helped both equally...but only paid the money to get it FDA approved for depression, as that's a much bigger market and much more in need of innovation.
It's not a fast acting benzo like ativan or xanax or whatever, but after a few weeks on it, after we stepped it up to 40mg? I have ABSOLUTELY noticed an improvement in my anxiety. Even during the pandemic. Talk to your psych about it. I am lucky my insurance is good with scrips and knocks the price down but drs are usually given discount cards to bring it down to $15 a month if your insurance is not so tolerant. And - no real side effects, which is the most amazing part. I took 2 antidepressants for a couple weeks each and just could not deal with the exhaustion and other issues. None of that with viibryd, at all. The one time I missed a couple doses I got 'brain zaps' (which was terrible, ngl) but that's almost any AD medication.
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This sounds amazing. I'll ask.
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TRIPPPLE PPPOST
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@Wretched Nope on this one. I'm a bit compulsive about trying to get the precise word I want, despite often having serious trouble accessing the right portion of my lexicon. I may end up exclaiming something frustrated about 'the thing with the thing' if that's going really poorly, but I care very much about connotations and will generally wait or say 'the closest I can get right now is X but that isn't quite right' if I can't find the correct word. This is one of the reasons I'm a slow writer despite being a fast typist.
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@Ninjakitten I have epic ammounts of impatience when it comes to communication and i word replace often.
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goddamnit I forgot to put the timer on the oven and I have no idea how long my salmon has been in there.
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@Wretched said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
This used to be my life in meetings at work; I had a lot of coping mechanisms like digging fingernails into the palms of my hands so that the pain was a thing that would force me to remember "hey there's pain for a reason" and that reason was "force your brain to stay on this one topic" and stuff.
Then I got ADHD meds, which was amazing and I no longer had to struggle and force myself to stay aware/processing in long meetings. (And no longer associated such meetings with physical pain!)
Then we had a pandemic, and I ran out of ADHD meds, and they took an abnormally long time to get refilled.
Going back to this for the past couple of weeks has not been fun. Thankfully, the one benefit to Zoom meetings is I can screen-record the meeting and rewind if I have to. (And thankfully I got my ADHD med refill yesterday, finally.)
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@Wretched #lifehack
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