Concerta, Adderall -- neither one is showing effectiveness

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Before we knew my son had aspergers, they put him on aderrall, it's seem to help for a few
days and then one night he came unglued!! ! He started thinking about a drum and couldn't stop thinking about it, he started screaming out of control for hours.. I was freaking out...i felt like oh my gosh, what have i gave my son to do this!! !
So needless to say we never took it again, he is on abilify now and it has done okay so far. I just worry about these medications and what are they really doing to him.
He also has complex partial seizures, so now he takes triliptal for that.

You're a good parent.

I'm lazy myself and dislike learning "games" that make learning fun. My son wouldn't buy that. He'd quickly change the subject. He asks the big questions, usually of a philoslophical nature, and I have to try to answer. Sometimes, I'm tired and would rather just space out, literally, after teaching hs students.

I do wish I was more of a science and math person because I think my son would love to discuss these subjects. in depth. When he asks how long the sun will last, how far it is, or some other question, I don't have the answer. He would bring up these great ideas about 4D and even sketched out a picture--then that fixation seemed to go away. One time, he got his hands on a biology teacher--brought him to a meeting, and he cornered him and asked one question after another. Maybe he knows not to ask me--the dumb one.

If I try to involve myself in his things, he pushes me away. We talk and laugh and discuss lots of things but then he likes his space, I like mine and that's it. I don't want to do his homework--it should be his. When it feels like mine, we're done--literally. He's able to keep up to speed doing minimal homework--which is fine with me. I'd like to see a third grade teacher fail a student for not completing homework. Ridiculous. He does work at home, it's just not the school's work--it's his own independent study-- of his choice. I have great arguments against homework and am prepared to use them if necessary.

equinn

As for the Adderall -- the doctor suggested that I try different dosages. We did 10 mg. for more than a few days, and didn't notice any change. I upped the dosage to 10.5 mg, on Sunday, and his teacher at church said that he was VERY quiet. So I figure that's too high. I'm going to go down to .5 mg for the next few days, and see what happens. I've seen what he acts like when the meds are working, and so far with Adderall, I don't see that positive change.

Homework is just a pain, plain and simple. I hate it. BUT, having said that, a fair amount of homework is good in terms of what he will have to learn to do when he goes to high school and college. It's interesting to discover, as we did recently, that he has really very little problem writing a report. He does this rather well, and quickly. Math takes a lot longer, even though he does well. Science is easy, because this is his favorite subject. None of this homework is bad when it's one class -- but if the stars align in a bad way, and three or four classes have homework on the same night, it's awful.

KimJ, your comments about a kind of negative homework routine, where there is stalling involved, is often what the problem is. He is tired when he comes home, but we have him begin anyway, because we've tried letting him relax for a few hours and THEN do homework, and that didn't work at all. We have to strike while the iron is hot, especially if he "forgets" an assignment until late in the day, or if he has trouble with something. When he begins his homework, he often gets a snack, then does some homework, then sharpens his pencil, then does some homework . . . and then he just stalls. He forgets to ask us for help when he's stuck. We generally have him do one subject, finish it, and then play a video game for a while before he has to do more homework.

He is getting better, partially because we've complimented him so much when he does his math quickly. Now he's remembering how fast he can do it, and compares each time he does well to the LAST time he did well.

gbollard, I like your mother's idea of doing math on the swing -- it reminds me of how they do math in the Waldorf School, where they march or clap while doing multiplication, etc. Apparently the rhythm is helpful.

Part of why I find the med situation so confusing is that my son has NEVER had any bad reactions to his meds. His appetite is good, he sleeps well, and he hasn't had any strong negative reactions. Having said that, he also hasn't had strong positive responses.

Kris

AAAACK! I just couldn't read all those posts, so if I'm repeating someting someone else already said... sorry!

I'm speaking as a person diagnosed with ADD/HD.
As an adult, I found that neither Ritalin, Adderall, nor Straterra gave me any noticeable help at all.
Sure there were times when I thought, "Hey! I did pretty good this morning!", but I never knew if it was the meds or just a good day.

Today I am off all meds.
I am also returning to school going to the local 2-year college.
Here's how I manage in class, which may or may not help you...

I sit up front.. very important since it puts me in close proximty to the teacher and the blackboard (whiteboard or whatever).
When I was a kid, sitting farther back just allowed me to be overtaken by everything I could see from back there.
Up closer to the instructor helps me narrow my field of vision in a way... I've got almost my whole field of vision filled by the instructor and the board.

For homework... I can't really remember much about homework and my younger years other than Sunday night being filled with GREAT AMOUNTS of working hard late into the early morning hours to get my stuff done for school before Monday.

Today, I find that I cannot do homework... AT HOME! Just too many distractions and not all of them come from without... some come from my running through all the things at home I need to finish, fix, get started on, etc....

Perhaps your son fits this pattern a little bit too? Maybe not.

Our daughter is very much like me although the lady doctor who diagnosed me also checked out our daughter and didn't think she had ADD/HD.

Anyway, what I do for her and homework is to break it up into small manageable chunks... 10-20 minutes at a time.

I always make sure to 'drop in' on her during her homework and ask how it's going... just real casual like.
This interupts her wandering mind and allows her to come back to the present and continue on with her homework.

I really do sympathize with you.... our daughter was holding the same hours as your son and I was getting REALLY PEAVED at the schools for sending so much homework home.

Trouble was, it wasn't the amount as much as it was our daughter.
She tends to write very long, and multiple paragraphs when the teachers would tell us most kids were hard pressed to offer three complete sentances... wonder where she got the long-windedness from .
She would also get so fixated on doing a problem in math a certain way even though her mom and I would show her different ways to arrive at the answer. If she was having trouble with the problem doing it the way "the teacher showed us", then nothing we said would budge her from working too long trying to get it right.

TOTAL FRUSTRATION for everyone.

My daughter is in her first year of high school now and seems to have a lot fewer issues than she did in elementary and junior high schools.

So... meds do not necessarily work for everyone diagnosed with ADD/HD... perhaps check on seating arrangements in the classroom... and break up the homework in smaller time chunks to keep your son from drifting off for hours on end.

Hope some of this helps a little.

8 hours of homework? Get a grip... I would have strangled my parents long ago.

Concerta and Ritalina/e only works on people with ADHD and speeds up people not having that dysfunction. The therapeutic doses of amfetamine are so low they just wake up instead of having to struggle to keep awake.

Me and my ex has melatonine for the night just to keep our two boys down, because when they get the Concerta out of their bodies, they simply can't control themselves. And they find it utterly annoying not to have control of their limbs. They describe it as being a flipper game ball and you simply can't do anything about it.

We usualy when the Concerta goes out have a nice time meeting eachother in Quake or Unreal Tournament. Just to get some adrenaline pumping instead of the medication, and then all of my 3 kids just calms down.

Well, about the games, it's their way of taking up the adrenaline level a bit without killing eachother. They just enjoy fragging dad to bits. But they also laugh over Tom and Jerry smacking frying pans on eachother, something they would never do in real life. Something all my kids have in common is that they can't hurt a living person or animal. But in a computer game you just respawn back. I have had long discussions with my now 7 year old son about how we get the food he loves (meat). And my 11y daughter has absolutely no remorse when going fishing and thread up a worm on the hook, but she saves them from drowning when it's raining....

It's quite an show off having them playing these first person shooters because that's the help for them to just go down to a calmer state. But you don't want to be on the wrong end of a railgun, no matter how damn hard you jump and spin around. And when I was playing seriously I was about 7th in europe in Quake, and I'm still not that old so I don't think I'm that lousy in playing. They all play on internet servers, and it's not uncommon of them owning the game.

This weekend my 11y daughter for the first time hacked a computer. She just couldn't understand why my neighbour didn't have more protection. He tries to hack me and I tries to hack him. We are both experienced computer tech's <grin> (we work for different companies as server engineers) and we're friends. But she managed to plant a annoyer software that doesn't do any harm but is simply annoying. Not bad. She got a couple of hints what she would look for of course. And no, I'm not going to tell how.

Update: Microsoft published a HotFix for the flaw we used in the computer Reveeenge is so sweet when you have a 11 year old girl hacking a MCP/MCIE engineers own computer....