What happened when you stopped your meds?

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I am a former anti-meds person.
I take Ritalin.
I have seen neuroleptics work wonders.
However, I have seen too much use of meds to treat symptoms that bother others.
If you have something that works, and it's worth the side effects, stick with it.
I am ambivalent about whether it is worth the loss of my creativity to be able to eat a hot meal. I am totally in favor of something that has allowed me to get within reach of financial stability.
So I take my meds.
There is something in me that doesn't want to depend on them. But if I don't have financial stability then I will at some point be subject to someone or something that removes even more of my free will and self-determination.
No anti-medication stance is worth that.

I am not against meds in any way. I am against over-medicating. Many psychiatrists are quite guilty of feeding into this problem.

If a pdoc starts me off on a low dose, and then one day asks me if I would consider uping the dose a bit more, I say "no". Even if it isn't perfect, if I am functioning I let my own self do the rest. Especially with things like depression and anxiety. (Though with some things like psychotic symptoms, it doesn't always work that way). And oftentimes, with antidepressants, sometimes the lower doses end up being more effective anyways.

I never took any sort of medication - and I'm going to stay that way.

FULL STOP!

I've seen the grevious side effects that antidepressants have given to my mother and stepfather.

But to think about it, my opinion may be biast since I don't need medication.

Plus anti-depressants are the reason why my parents are not in a home.

I needed a high dose of Welbutrin and a low dose of Anafranil. When I first started taking Anafranil, I was given 50mg capsules. They made me chronicly tired, so they reduced the dose to 25mg a day and it worked great for 14 years. Things worked out the opposite way with the Welbutrin. I started out at 150mg/day and ended up at 400mg/day. The seizure thrshold is usually 450. I've spaced out and lost track of how many I had, and occasionally double dosed. I've ended up taking 500mg/day on several occasions and absolutely nothing happened. Once, I ended up taking 600mg in a day, but nothing happened apart from feeing unusually spaced, but I can't prove to myself that it was the massive dose that caused that.

I think that I'd oppose taking this medicine because of the side effects. ((Read it, it had me laughing out loud.))

That describes about 90% of the new stuff the drug companies have been putting on the market lately.

For reference, I'm not anti-meds. (I don't know if anyone thinks that or not, I just wanted to say it.) In fact I don't care what someone puts into their own system voluntarily, even if it's outright poison. But I have major problems with the way a lot of drugs are marketed and distributed, and the facts people are not given about them (as well as the lies people are told about them).

If I can't get back to my old self with meds that have low side effects very soon, than I'll probably adopt Serissa's philosophy on meds.

My life is such a disaster without meds I would never go back to being without, unless, of course, I figure out how to manufacture my own dopamine....

I take Adderall. I haven't completely stopped taking my medication, but I have gone without it some days. I am usually more irritable, more distracted, and sometimes I get a little bit manic when I don't take it. It's not a disaster when I don't take it, but it's better when I do.

The effects you are describing more or less match the "drug overdose" indications. Most kids naturally out-grow their ADD. If the dose wasn't lowered as demand fell then you would begin to over-medicate. How was your ADD after you stopped?


My life has also been transformed. Aside from improved attention, my insomnia is also gone and I'm a lot less forgetful. (I'm also losing about 2 pounds a week, which is improving my self-image.) In my case, though, I discovered AS on my own and never really thought about ADD until the doctor doing my AS evaluation listed it as a comorbid condition along with moderate depression. As soon as I found out there was such a thing as attention deficit without hyperactivity then everything made sense.


When I got my Dx the doc wanted me to start taking both Concerta and an anti-depressant but I said "no". With my experience in computer programming and electronics repair, I'm well aware that you can't evaluate cause and effect relationships when you make multiple changes simultaneously. Anti-depressants wouldn't help the ADD symptoms but there was a chance that managing the ADD would relieve the depression, so I agreed to start taking Concerta and that's all. I was mostly right. I think a lot of the depression was a result of the symptoms of the undiagnosed AS and ADD along with the frustration of not knowing what was wrong. Getting diagnosed didn't make my problems go away (in fact some have become worse, at least temporarily), but I am a lot less frustrated now because I have regained some sense of control over my life.

Somewhat manageable. I still tend to forget where I am and what I am doing, but I can backtrack enough to remember whatever I need.

But I can do homework and school stuff well-enough without it, so I don't bother to take it.

I function well enough to have a job, do volunteer work and stuff, but I have a rather large pile of stuff to clean at home and repair that hasn't been done for months.


/me makes note on outgrowing ADD. . . .

It is not true that most kids outgrow their ADHD.
There's been research to show that they don't.
There are a lot of interesting reasons why they might seem to outgrow it.
Consider:
As children age, they have less to do in terms of school related activities.
They also start to drink coffee, some of them quite a lot of it. They are reinforced both physically and socially for this.
They get toys to help organize their lives (PDAs, organizers, computers, etc)
They get reinforcement for organization at work (pay).
They get people to organize their lives (wives).
Or they, like me, get medication because taking 1200 mg caffeine per day is not good for me.

As a child I was never diagnosed because people blamed my symptoms on my high IQ, my being brown skinned, or, as my mother told me, just plain bad.

Still confused about emoticons....

oops
posted in the wrong place....

One thing I forgot to add.
When I went on a gluten free diet I was able to reduce the amount of medication I was taking...

Going off medication (Aropax) a few years ago was disastrous for me. At first I felt better than I had for years but it was an illusory euphoria, soon followed by crippling panic attacks and depression.

I didn't think the medication was doing much good but when I went back onto it the panic attacks disappeared but the depression wasn't much better. I now take Efexor and Epilim and they work reasonably well but a lot of depression now seems to be started by adverse events in my life, even little ones.

I don't think any medication will take away all the anxiety either, but as long as it's generally manageable, I'm happy.

People who need medications because of brain chemistry imbalances (which is what I think I have) shouldn't have to feel bad about it. That doesn't mean to say that all people with depression and/or anxiety need medication but some do.