Jose Rizal posted:

Does anyone else with ADHD have an inconveniently high sex drive/sex drive that is higher than most people of your age and gender? I'm sure I'll appreciate this when I'm 40, but right now it is really annoying.

edit: haha what a goofy way to start the new page

Jose Rizal posted:

Does anyone else with ADHD have an inconveniently high sex drive/sex drive that is higher than most people of your age and gender? I'm sure I'll appreciate this when I'm 40, but right now it is really annoying.

edit: haha what a goofy way to start the new page

Authentic You posted:

Jose Rizal posted:

Does anyone else with ADHD have an inconveniently high sex drive/sex drive that is higher than most people of your age and gender? I'm sure I'll appreciate this when I'm 40, but right now it is really annoying.

edit: haha what a goofy way to start the new page

Jose Rizal posted:

Does anyone else with ADHD have an inconveniently high sex drive/sex drive that is higher than most people of your age and gender? I'm sure I'll appreciate this when I'm 40, but right now it is really annoying.

edit: haha what a goofy way to start the new page

YggiDee posted:

I've never realized how much of a difference my were making for me until I met a co-worker whose ADHD is clearly worse than mine. Then it was just "poo poo, is that how I look to everyone else? " Man goddamn vibrates. It's like, now that I observe it from the outside, I can definitely see how I was compared to how I am.

Qu Appelle posted:

I've also had coworkers comment to me that I 'flail' and move around lot, and they find it distracting. It got better when the chance to do something really physical came up, I was like "Oh please! Gimme something where I have to move around! Yes!" I've also gotten scolded for butting into conversations, so that's something I also watch.

YggiDee posted:

I've never realized how much of a difference my were making for me until I met a co-worker whose ADHD is clearly worse than mine. Then it was just "poo poo, is that how I look to everyone else? " Man goddamn vibrates. It's like, now that I observe it from the outside, I can definitely see how I was compared to how I am.

Qu Appelle posted:

One just sort of sat there like a space cadet half the time, and was really unobtrusive.

Effexxor posted:

My big issue with my sex drive is that I have no patience with foreplay. I want 'wham bam thank you ma'am' and getting myself to slow down and enjoy is incredibly hard. And even worse, I'm a girl so I'm supposed to love that stuff.

TheGopher, I'm really bad on the cycles too. It's interesting to look at my records for how much I fundraise on a weekly basis at work, because you'll see every 2-3 months a little blip of a few weeks where I do awful. After I get that over with I do great. It's frustrating for everyone involved.

As for dealing with procrastination, write out a schedule. Tell yourself 'Okay, at 2:00 I will go to the laundromat. Tomorrow I will do (insert thing that needs to get done) at 11.' Knowing that you have a plan always helps me.

Qu Appelle posted:

I feel you on the college thing.

I would absolutely discuss it with the colleges in question - ADHD is a recognized medical condition that causes learning disabilities, and they are required to accommodate that. However, they have to know about it in order to do that accommodation. It also shows that your erratic scores are due to said ADHD, as opposed to just slacking off and being a high school wasteoid

Dr. Russell Barkley posted:

Subtract 30 percent from their age and ask the question again. Age 16, what do you let people do in this state? [Drive.] All right, subtract 30 percent from their age. You just gave an 11-year-old an automobile. And you said be nice, follow the rules, pay attention, show self-control, and organize your driving. What would you expect to see if you gave 11-year-olds cars?
[...]
You have one of the few 18-year-old teens with AD/HD that wants to go to college, because very few of them will ever go to college, right? You’ve got one who does. You’re sending a 12-year-old to college. If that were true, what adjustments, what accommodations would need to be in place in a university environment for any 12-year-old to succeed in that environment? Would you send them to UCLA? With class sizes that run several thousand in the introductory freshman classes? Absolutely not. Very small college, very small classes, with a learning disabilities program and accommodations, so that you would be tailoring that environment to that individual with a smaller course load, hand-picked professors, a lot of assistance, curriculum, video tapes, study groups, other people there to assist them through the LD resource program, and twelve to fourteen kids in a class. You’re going to look for a very tiny liberal arts college that does a lot of LD accommodations, and then maybe this kid will get a college degree. You drop this kid into a state university, he will not finish that first semester.

Our research is informative, because it tells you what adjustments you need to make given the developmental lag that you’re dealing with. What I hear is, “He should be normal. He should be doing what those other kids are doing,” which of course is ridiculous. That’s like expecting a retarded child to act normal.

Aculard posted:

Argh! I don't care if you want to put me on a regime of snorting pixie sticks with chasers of whiskey 3 times a day just throw me a bone and help me out with this poo poo! At least the one upside was the doctor was disappointed in the way my last doc treated me and agreed that putting someone on ritalin, then accusing them of being a drug addict when they want to switch back to adderall xr is pretty lovely.

Socket Ryanist posted:

Have any of you noticed that, while on your meds, you are more productive... but not on the thing you wanted to be productive on?

Qu Appelle posted:

Qu Appelle posted:

He wasn't OK with that, but no matter how I explained it, he couldn't (or wouldn't) understand that I had basically enough brain power and energy to get up, go to work, do just enough to not get fired, go home, heat up a can of soup for dinner, and then play World of Warcraft until I went to bed. That was it. Then, I got an actual diagnosis.

Then I got some motherfucking , and my world just completely changed. I have done more studying in the past year for Software Development/IT stuff than I have in literally the past decade before. (Of course, I'm unemployed now, but I'm spending my spare time job hunting and teaching myself JavaScript. And I haven't played WoW in almost three years.)

Aculard posted:

In my case it was going to school and playing guildwars. Hell, last night when I went back on medication I wrote up 80$ worth of articles in a row and now I've made rent for the week so I don't have to poo poo myself with worry about it. gently caress yeah !!! (I have also stopped playing guildwars for years)

signalnoise posted:

Man after I finally hit up a doctor and just got some drat wellbutrin all of a sudden my new career goal is to go ahead and aim for a doctorate and shoot for the top in academia, when just a few months ago I was like "I just want a loving job, man"

Aculard posted:

Does wellbutrin help you a lot as an antidepressant? I'm stuck on adderall xr 20mg for now which isn't bad, but I still get some pretty bad waves of sadness/anxiety everyday for no reason, or way out of proportion to the reason that caused it. Wellbutrin is an SNRI and not a SSRI right?

signalnoise posted:

It used to be that while doing my job, or driving, or whatever, I would just reflect on how worthless everything I was doing seemed.

Killing myself would be a whole lot easier than enduring it anymore, but I won't do that because I have people who care about me that would be hurt, plus I would have to find some way to do it without leaving a mess.

Orange_Lazarus posted:

Adderall

Aculard posted:

Not having sudden thoughts of wanting to die for pretty much no reason is...it sounds pretty great actually.

Orange_Lazarus posted:

I'm guessing "No". I'll probably just attempt to skip my meds on Thurs/Fri/Sun (I won't have school these days) and just deal with the ADHD at work (Work slower, etc). Otherwise I may try other medications but I'd hope to be able to go back to 30mg of Adderal if I don't like the other ones.

TheGopher posted:

I'm thinking of more detailed information falling under three broader categories: General/What is ADHD, Getting Diagnosed/Treatment, and Day-to-day Coping and Strategies. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but that's what the rest of you are for, chiming in!

_{title: Ask us about ADHD if we can remember to post.}

Then again, maybe you don't care and you like this topic better, post away!

quote:

2) So far, I've been taking a non-pharmaceutical approach - it's a technique called neurobiofeedback. Basically, it's brain training in front of a computer by playing games. You wear a helmet with electrodes that generate an EEG. When the electrodes detect brain wave frequencies associated with focus and attention, it provides you some kind of feedback in a game. One provider's hardware interfaces with a PlayStation - imagine playing Gran Turismo and not being able to accelerate unless you get your brain into the focused state. It takes a while (30-40 sessions with a psychologist) and it's not cheap (insurance won't pay unless you've got some other comorbid condition that you can have the psych also treating you for). The benefit is that if it works right for you, you don't need meds. Ever. It basically re-wires your brain.

quote:

Whatever its final incarnation, the recently enacted landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will expand Medicaid eligibility and is expected by 2013 to provide coverage, including mental health care, to an estimated 4.1 million children currently uninsured.

That's a good thing. But what will the quality of care be, especially for vulnerable children with special health care needs? Poor, according to a new report in the current online edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In cooperation with LA Care, one of the nation's largest public health plans, and the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (DMH), UCLA researchers looked at how well one of the most vulnerable groups of young patients were faring in the managed-care Medicaid system — children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Led by Dr. Bonnie Zima, a UCLA professor of psychiatry, the researchers sought to compare how children diagnosed with ADHD under Medicaid fared in primary care (treatment by pediatricians and family medicine physicians) versus in specialty mental health clinics. Their goal was to compare both the nature of care and the end result.

The researchers found:

• The clinical severity of ADHD did not differ among children in primary care or specialty mental health care.
  
• There was little cross-over of children between the two sectors. If a child began treatment only in primary care, he or she had no contact with specialty mental health; the same pattern held true for children who were initially receiving care in specialty mental health. This prevented the two specialty areas from coordinating care.
  
• In primary care, most children with ADHD were appropriately prescribed stimulant medication to help their symptoms (the standard of care) but averaged only one to two follow-up visits a year with their doctor.
  
• In specialty mental health clinics, less than one-third of children received any stimulant medication, but they received psychosocial interventions, such as therapy and/or case management, averaging five or more visits per month.
  
• Overall, in both primary and specialty mental health care, about one-third of children with ADHD and impairment dropped out of care. Over time, the drop-out rate for children served in primary care clinics reached 50 percent.
  
• In both primary and specialty care, more than one-third of children prescribed stimulant medication failed to continue taking medication.
  
• Most tellingly, clinical outcomes such, as ADHD symptoms, functioning, academic achievement, parent distress, perceived benefit of treatment, and improved family functioning, were similar among children who remained in care and children who received no care at all.
  

The researchers used data supplied by LA Care and the DMH to look at the care of 530 children diagnosed with ADHD, a condition marked by excessive activity (hyperactivity), impulsivity and difficulties with focusing attention. The children, ages 5 to 11, received treatment in primary care or specialty mental health clinics from November 2004 through September 2006.

The investigators developed their data using a set of longitudinal analyses drawn from Medicaid service and pharmacy claims data, parent and child interviews, and school records to characterize the mental health care and clinical outcomes of children across three six-month time intervals.

"With the support of National Institute of Mental Health research funds, we were able to link the agency's databases," Zima said. "This was a great example of a partnership between our health service research center here at UCLA and agency leaders at both the county and state level."

Quality was poor in both the primary care and specialty care sectors, Zima said, but for different reasons. Children in primary care received predominantly medication treatment, and one-quarter of the children had been prescribed a stimulant plus another type of psychotropic medication. Yet because follow-up visits were negligible, averaging one to two per year, there was little opportunity to monitor medication safety.

In contrast, almost all children in specialty mental health clinics received some type of psychosocial intervention, such as therapy and/or case management, with an average of about five visits per month. Less than one-third of these children had at least one stimulant medication prescription filled.

In both sectors, documentation of behavior therapy or parent training was missing in the agency databases.

"Despite these substantial differences in treatment and service-use intensity, the children we studied remained symptomatic over time, whether or not they were in care," Zima said.

Findings from this study identified several areas for quality improvement for ADHD care, including a better alignment of the child's clinical severity with provider type, a greater number of follow-up visits, the use of stimulant medication in specialty mental health clinics, help for children to stay on their medications, and better agency data systems to document the delivery of recommended care and patient outcomes.

With ADHD representing one of the most common mental health disorders — it affects 3 to 10 percent of children in the U.S. — improvement in care is critical, according to Zima.

"The quality of care for ADHD is of high public health significance because it is the most common childhood psychiatric disorder, has established treatment, and can persist into adolescence and adulthood with devastating long-term consequences," Zima said.

###

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Other authors included Regina Bussing, Lingqi Tang, Lily Zhang, Susan Ettner, Thomas R. Belin and Kenneth B. Wells. The authors report no conflict of interest.

The UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences is the home within the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for faculty who are experts in the origins and treatment of disorders of complex human behavior. The department is part of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, a world-leading interdisciplinary research and education institute devoted to the understanding of complex human behavior and the causes and consequences of neuropsychiatric disorders.

For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.

quote:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – An intensive, five-week working memory training program shows promise in relieving some of the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, a new study suggests.

Researchers found significant changes for students who completed the program in areas such as attention, ADHD symptoms, planning and organization, initiating tasks, and working memory.

"This program really seemed to make a difference for many of the children with ADHD," said Steven Beck, co-author of the study an associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

"It is not going to replace medication, but it could be a useful complementary therapy."

Beck conducted the study with Christine Hanson and Synthia Puffenberger, graduate students in psychology at Ohio State. Their findings are published in the November/December 2010 issue of the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.

The researchers tested software developed by a Swedish company called Cogmed, in conjunction with the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Stockholm.

The software is designed to improve one of the major deficiencies found in people with ADHD – working memory.

Working memory is the ability to hold onto information long enough to achieve a goal. For example, you have to remember a phone number long enough for you to dial it. Students have to remember the passage of a book they just read, in order to understand what they're currently reading.

"Working memory is critical in everyday life, and certainly for academic success, but it is one of the things that is very difficult for children with ADHD," Hanson said.

The study involved 52 students, aged 7 to 17, who attended a private school in Columbus that serves children with learning disabilities, many of whom also have an ADHD diagnoses. All the children used the software in their homes, under the supervision of their parents and the researchers.

The software includes a set of 25 exercises that students had to complete within 5 to 6 weeks. Each session is 30 to 40 minutes long. The exercises are in a computer-game format and are designed to help students improve their working memory. For example, in one exercise a robot will speak numbers in a certain order, and the student has to click on the numbers the robot spoke, on the computer screen, in the opposite order.

"At first the kids love it, because it is like a game," Puffenberger said. "But the software has an algorithm built in that makes the exercises harder as the students get better. So the children are always challenged."

Half the students participated at the beginning of the study. The other half were wait-listed, and completed the software program after the others were finished.

Parents and teachers of the participating students completed measures of the children's ADHD symptoms and working memory before the intervention, one month after treatment, and four months after treatment.

Results showed that parents generally rated their children as improving on inattention, overall number of ADHD symptoms, working memory, planning and organization and in initiating tasks. These changes were evident both immediately after treatment and four months later.

On individual measures, between one-fourth and one-third of the children showed clinically significant progress – in other words, enough progress to be easily visible to their parents.

The teacher ratings, while pointed in the direction of improvement, were not strong enough to be statistically significant in this study. That's not surprising, Beck said, because very few treatment studies ever find significance among teacher measures.

"Teachers only see the kids for a few hours a day and they are dealing with a lot of other children at the same time. It would be difficult for them to see changes," Beck said.

Beck said this is the first published study they know of testing this software in the United States. One of the strengths of the study is that it used a very typical sample of children with ADHD – other studies in Sweden had excluded children who were on medication.

"Most kids with ADHD are on some kind of medication, so it helps to know how this intervention works in these cases," he said.

In this sample, 60 percent of the students were on medication. The results showed the program was equally effective regardless of whether they were on medication or not.

"Medication for ADHD does not help directly with working memory, and the training program does, so it can be useful," Beck said.

"One of the encouraging findings is that parents reported even ADHD symptoms improved after the program, and that isn't the focus. This program is focused on improving working memory."

Beck said they can't say for sure how the program works to help kids with ADHD. But it seems that children are learning how to focus and how to use their working memory on everyday tasks, and they are able to use that knowledge at school and home.

One possible criticism of the study could be that it relies on parental reports, and the parents may be biased.

"That's true, but it is also the parents who are observing the kids day in and day out, and they are the ones who would be most likely to observe any changes that occur," Beck said.

The researchers plan on extending the work by using more objective measures of children's progress after using the program.

###

Two other co-authors of the study were William Benninger, an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State, and Kristen Benninger, a medical student at the University of Toledo

Beck, Hanson and Puffenberger have no financial interest in the company that makes the software. William Benninger does have an interest, but was not involved in the collection of the data.

signalnoise posted:

However, my suicidal thoughts stopped. Like, I just stopped having them. It used to be that while doing my job, or driving, or whatever, I would just reflect on how worthless everything I was doing seemed.

I had this little problem solving matrix in my head that looked like this: If I do the things I am supposed to do to get ahead in life, I gently caress up. If I do the things I actually want to do, I get punished for it, so I have no way to be happy or successful. Killing myself would be a whole lot easier than enduring it anymore, but I won't do that because I have people who care about me that would be hurt, plus I would have to find some way to do it without leaving a mess. If I didn't have the network of people who cared about me that tied me down to where I was living, I would be able to just go ahead and flip that switch, but then again if no one cared where I was, I could go do whatever I want. So I don't know if I would actually kill myself if I didn't have anyone to disappoint, but either way that would be a relief.

That thought used to echo in my mind daily. One month later, I remember it, but I don't dwell on it anymore. I can think about the fact that I'm making progress. That's really where this new drive comes from. Instead of thinking I'm chained by financial slavery, I can say gently caress it and shoot for the stars. I'm smart enough for it anyway, and my professors say I would do well in academia based on the way I write.

On the other hand, I got a prescription for clonazepam to handle my anxiety problems when I get a serious wave of it. It's great for that, but now I am much more aware of when I have those feelings, since I have a way to shut them out. As a result, I am taking it more often than I thought I would, and in higher doses (taking .5mg instead of the .25mg I originally took). I don't want to build up a tolerance for an anxiety medication, and I don't want to have these anxiety attacks more often or something like that as a result of some kind of downer effect from not taking it.

Funny thing about my anxiety though is I only get anxiety attacks from feelings of failure. I just ruminate over things I could potentially gently caress up, be it test scores or whatever. In my experience, people who talk about having some anxiety to work though say they have problems with it in public speaking or something like that, but I'm the opposite. I get anxiety when I am alone with my thoughts, and I am great when it comes to public speaking.