ADHD and medication

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I'm a member of another forum where someone is asking for help. Their six year old has recently been diagnosed with ADHD, and they've started him first on Concerta, then Ritalin.

The kid is becoming more hyper and aggressive than ever. Which begs the question: does he have ADHD at all? Isn't this how people without ADHD react to those drugs? Or is this normal in an initial phase?

Anyone with experience?

Many of the drugs prescribed for ADHD are actually STIMULANTS....but they are supposed to have paradoxical effects on younger children.

I was once prescribed Ritalin----but they took me off it right away because it made me hyper.

Nice to see you, Underwater.

Lovely to see you too

But do you have ADHD? I'm thinking that at least autistic people might be very sensitive to this stuff. What do you mean by paradoxical effects? Randomness?

I'm not officially diagnosed with ADHD----but I was officially diagnosed with "brain injury" and autism when I was about 3 years old. Part of the complex of "brain injury" and "minimal brain dysfunction" consisted of what later became ADHD.

Ritalin is supposed to "paradoxically" calm children down, despite the fact that it's a stimulant. Stimulants are not meant to calm people down; hence the "paradox."

If the meds don't work, give them up.
Maybe the external symptoms match ADHD but the underlying mechanism doesn't? Psychiatry is still very poor in recognizing mechanisms underlying diagnoses.
There is a lot of tips for handling ADHD children without medication, they most likely apply anyway.

About half of the children on the spectrum that I have met, have ADHD symptoms.

ADHD is not the issue. When my son was 2.5 years old, he couldn't stay still for 3 seconds. That was his attention span as well. To me, 3 seconds were plenty enough to teach him to read and a lot of other skills. Before my son was 3 years old, he was reading books, and his ADHD also subsided.

If you read carefully about ADHD, they will always mention ADHD kids also have "hyperfocus." In other words, there is no deficit of attention, nor hyperactivity, in these kids, when they are interested in something. So, ADHD is a misnomer.

ADHD is not the problem. Underdevelopment is the problem. You develop the brains of these children, their ADHD goes away. Our society has gone the wrong direction. We tend to think that we need to solve ADHD first, so that our children can develop. Nope. The reality is totally the opposite. We should develop our children first, then their ADHD will go away, automatically.

What can I say? The way we raise neurotypical children is by filling up their brains with skills/knowledge. However, that's not the way autistic children develop. It is because our society only knows how to raise neurotypical children, that teachers end up looking at ADHD as a problem. There is a different way of raising autistic children, where ADHD is not an issue, at all. Read this:

http://www.eikonabridge.com/pull_not_push_english_handout.pdf

My 5 year old has been diagnosed with ADHD. He has tried a couple mild anxiety medications and he reacted poorly to each. He developed facial tics with Hydroxyzine and was mean with Buspar. We’re not trying anything else.

My son’s cousin also was diagnosed with ADHD (and high functioning autism). He’s 10. He has tried all sorts of ADHD medications, including the ones you mentioned. His doctors have confirmed that his growth has been stunted by the medications. His parents say what he’s on now are working well, but he’s developed a serious caffeine problem. He drinks coffee every morning and then pounds cokes and monster energy drinks all day.

Maybe it’s the stimulants calming him down effect, but I feel it’s also possible that his body is trying to make up for the medications slowing him down.

My understanding is that if the kid needs medication, you have to be patient and try things out until you find what works.

What works for one person might be quite disastrous for another person.

I was on Ritalin for a few months when I was 11. My teacher complained to my parents that I wasn't paying attention in her class, and sweet-talked them into having me medicated. (I read that it's not uncommon for elementary school teachers, who are usually women, to have that done to boys.) They obeyed like lap dogs. The Ritalin effects were horrible! I was more sluggish than before, and cried myself to sleep every night. My therapist at the time further rubbed salt in the wound, by cooing at me when I told her how horrible I felt. I guess my parents had a moment of mercy when they saw me crying at night, because they took me off Ritalin.

In reality, what I really needed was antidepressants. It's extremely hard to pay attention in class when it's simply not a priority. My mind was super-busy with making suicide plans, coming up with a least painful method, and thinking of ways to minimize funeral costs for my parents. (We were very poor at the time, and having moved cross-country a year ago didn't help.) I never told anybody any of this, because I knew my parents would punish me for "talking nonsense", and my therapist would side with them and against me. I knew that when she cooed at me the first time I told her how sad I felt. Shortly later, I took up drinking alcohol, by stealing my parents' whiskey.

The biggest betrayal about Ritalin is that I was kind of swindled into it. It was sold to me as a medication that will "help me be afraid of things less". Back then, I still had fresh memories of the chandelier I was terrified of, so a pill that could eliminate a similar possibility sounded very seductive. I quickly learned that every word out of an adult's mouth is a lie.

We are sure my (mostly) NT daughter is ADHD. She is sure. Various teachers are sure. But we never medicated her or talked to a doctor about it. Instead, she was given the opportunity to learn coping mechanisms on her own. It helps that she is super smart and wasn't falling behind at school; also that she is a girl and naturally less physical; I think that allowed us a luxury not all families will be offered. And I'm glad for it: natural coping mechanisms are tools for a lifetime. What works for her? Splitting her attention usually allows her to focus best. So, music or TV while doing homework. Drawing while listening to a lecture. New teachers have often been confused by her apparent focus on a drawing, and tried to call her on it with surprise questions. Which she can always answer perfectly. Any confused teachers have always learned to let her be.