As someone who takes an ADHD medication, I find the idea of a drug shortage terrifying. Life gets so, so much harder when I’m unmedicated.
It’s like the difference between walking on a sidewalk and walking in sucking mud, with stuff falling out of your pockets you have to keep going back to find. You build a life that’s only possible thanks to your ability to walk on sidewalks. If you suddenly find you can only get around by walking through mud, even with a huge amount of will power, you’re going to watch your life fall apart as you just can’t keep up the pace of your old life.
Very early in my life I told my dad I wanted off of Ritalin because it didn’t feel sustainable for me. So when I was about 8 or 9 I chose to try to create mental tools to deal with ADHD over medication. I don’t know if it worked as well. It’d be nice to have a prescription that worked for me. I went to try other prescriptions a few times and never felt like they worked for me. I might try to go back to Ritalin but with the shortage it feels pointless to try to do.
As a fellow ADD-haver, I advocate for you to continue trying new medications. Studies show that ADD/ADHD responds to medicine better than almost any other psychiatric disorder, even if it sometimes requires multiple revisions or a cocktail to achieve the desired effect.
If you’re intrigued, I will refer you to this lecture by Dr. Barkley. The entire lecture is valuable, though I recognize that asking someone to watch 60+ minutes of jargon is not overly helpful! To make things easier – if you’ll pardon my layman’s editorializing – I’ve curated a list of specifically relevant timestamps:
As someone who takes an ADHD medication, I find the idea of a drug shortage terrifying. Life gets so, so much harder when I’m unmedicated.
It’s like the difference between walking on a sidewalk and walking in sucking mud, with stuff falling out of your pockets you have to keep going back to find. You build a life that’s only possible thanks to your ability to walk on sidewalks. If you suddenly find you can only get around by walking through mud, even with a huge amount of will power, you’re going to watch your life fall apart as you just can’t keep up the pace of your old life.
Very early in my life I told my dad I wanted off of Ritalin because it didn’t feel sustainable for me. So when I was about 8 or 9 I chose to try to create mental tools to deal with ADHD over medication. I don’t know if it worked as well. It’d be nice to have a prescription that worked for me. I went to try other prescriptions a few times and never felt like they worked for me. I might try to go back to Ritalin but with the shortage it feels pointless to try to do.
As a fellow ADD-haver, I advocate for you to continue trying new medications. Studies show that ADD/ADHD responds to medicine better than almost any other psychiatric disorder, even if it sometimes requires multiple revisions or a cocktail to achieve the desired effect.
If you’re intrigued, I will refer you to this lecture by Dr. Barkley. The entire lecture is valuable, though I recognize that asking someone to watch 60+ minutes of jargon is not overly helpful! To make things easier – if you’ll pardon my layman’s editorializing – I’ve curated a list of specifically relevant timestamps:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this lecture by Dr. Barkely
Stimulants, including new formulations and delivery systems
Stimulant alternatives, some of which may be combined w/ each other and/or stimulants on a doctor’s recommendation
The neurobiology of executive dysfunction and the neuroprotective argument for seeking medication
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The Piped version of the video is very much failing to load for me. Does anyone happen to know why?
It appears to be a Piped outage. Both the homepage and video links are loading slowly and frequently seem to outright fail.