Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Found Out Whats Wrong With Me.

F

Fearless Leader

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Mar 21, 2006
2,360
0
Hoosiertown
Well I took a test a little while ago for school and got the answers back today. It was testing for various disorders/other things. I came back with "Significant Short Term Memory Problems" I think was the wording, and has strong indication for one of the ADblah blah blah disorders.

Though I can't imagine the world on the medicine that controls this kind of stuff. My little sisters have ADsomething or another and the difference is night and day when they are on and off it. I kinda like life being disorderly and a bit chaotic.

I think the medicine would hamper my creativity actually. My math and science teachers (my strong points) all agree I come up with "Different" (to quote them) ways to solve problems. and the rest of my day I just wonder and think about stuff.

And the short term memory isn't a problem because I figured that out a long time ago and have notebooks full of ideas and crap I need to remember/do.

What do you all think about the various medicines for stuff like this?
 
If your talking about ADD and ADHD, the drugs do calm you down a lot and change your thinking a bit. They can make you less creative, but they also make you concentrate more.

It really depends what is more important, concentration, or creativeness, what's going to help you the most ?
 
OnceUGoMac said:
It is so over-diagnosed that unless you are being hindered in some way, skip it.
Click to expand...

What I was thinking, My sisters on the other hand really needed it as they were being really hampered, and just wondered what others were like on the medicine.

The mind wonderingness is something I hated while a young kid, but now I mostly love it. And I can easily read long books, short books, do long time consuming projects as long as I concentrate on it.
 
There are other causes of short term memory loss, including depression, sleep apnea, lyme disease, MS, vitamin B12 deficiency, side-effects from other medication, and a litany of other less likely causes. Before committing to treatment for ADHD or ADD, you should see a doctor to explore potential medical conditions that are causing your memory loss.
 
Oh, goodness, ADD/ADHD...

I can tell you about those medications--

Rittalin messed with my bipolar and turned me into the barely living dead.
Concerta made my eye twitch ridiculously and made me look crazier than I am.
Straterra had me vomiting every day that I took it.

I'll stick with my Wellbutrin, thanks; ADD/ADHD meds are for people who eat 3000 calories of pure refined white sugar daily.
 
Everyone reacts differently to medication so don't worry too much until you've tried it.
I've been diagnosed with mild-moderate ADD and was treated for it. They tried Strattera, it made me very hostile. I was put on Adderall instead. Good stuff. Lost some weight and was actually able to concentrate. I liked that I could read a book and not have my mind travel every few minutes and have to go back a page because I'd been staring blankly at words.
I didn't think it dampened creativity. It changed how I did things though and my paintings became more detailed. <shrug> It made me rather intense though and sometimes I didn't like that.

I just take Bupropion (Wellbutrin/Zyban) now and I'm fine with that. It's a completely unique antidepressant actually, but it sorts me right out.
 
Fearless Leader said:
Well I took a test a little while ago for school and got the answers back today. It was testing for various disorders/other things. I came back with "Significant Short Term Memory Problems" I think was the wording, and has strong indication for one of the ADblah blah blah disorders.

Though I can't imagine the world on the medicine that controls this kind of stuff. My little sisters have ADsomething or another and the difference is night and day when they are on and off it. I kinda like life being disorderly and a bit chaotic.

I think the medicine would hamper my creativity actually. My math and science teachers (my strong points) all agree I come up with "Different" (to quote them) ways to solve problems. and the rest of my day I just wonder and think about stuff.

And the short term memory isn't a problem because I figured that out a long time ago and have notebooks full of ideas and crap I need to remember/do.

What do you all think about the various medicines for stuff like this?
Click to expand...

I'm exactly like you.

Got the pills for my ADHD, although I think the "H" part of it began to fade away after I turned 22 and now I'm just ADD. :p

If I didn't take it, I would have failed out of uni my first year. I only found out that I have ADD when I was 19. If I don't take it, I'm useless. I do think more linearly, which is good and bad.

BAD POINTS OF RITALIN:
- I don't feel like the old "me". My personality is different, which is also a bad thing and a good thing. It's easy to make me frustrated if I don't take my pills. When I take my pills, I have a better temper. :eek:

- I become a linear thinker. People with ADD are supposed to be more creative because apparently, we're thinking so many unrelated things that we come up with cool ideas.

- I lose weight if I take them as prescribed. Usually, I only take them when I want to do work. If I take 20 mg in the morning (2 pills), and 10 or 20 mg in the afternoon, I end up losing a lot of weight because I never feel hungry. (this is a bad thing because I don't need to lose weight)



GOOD THINGS ABOUT RITALIN:
- Grades improved. Well, my grades improved, and if they work, so will your grades.

- I can read more than 1 page in 2 hours. :eek:

- Also, we live in a linear thinking world, and whether you like it or not is irrelevant. I'll tell you right now that you'll benefit a lot at uni, meetings with professors, teaching someone how to do something, etc, if you just take the pills. For chilling out with friends, weekends, nights out with friends, bumming around the house, I would never dream of taking my pills.
 
My family used to joke around that at my old school, kids would be lining up for their ritalin.
I was recently tested and they found that I had ADHD and Dislexia (see, I can't even spell it) I worked with some people at school and with my parents now I'm doing great. I'm not even taking any thing for that stuff. I found I was alergic to Adderall (it gave me the hives), we decided not to use anything.

Next year I'm taking a "Resource Center/Support" class 2-3 times a week rather than a everyday a week, like last year. But that class was a great help, the teacher had the notes from class when I (or someone else) nissed the notes or couldn't get them all from a specific class.

If you feel that you think need one of these classes, talk to who's ever in charge (at school) of scheduling.

(The one thing ADHD really does to me which I adknowledge but just brush off anyway: Getting really off track with tabbed browsing. That's why I use a browser with no tabs for school.)
 
It's a personal choice, yes. But there is also a healthy choice. The healthiest of choices is to see a real professional psychologist, and perhaps a psychiatrist upon referral, to look at your options after there is a real, full, seconded diagnosis; PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR THIS KIND OF ADVICE ON THE *INTERNET*.
 
To the OP:

AFAIK, folks have had ADD and ADHD for a long time.

Only recently was it diagnosed. Now it seems everyone has it. Yet, I am sure if we went back a 100 years ago, many folks would have had it then as well, only we wouldn't have diagnosed it as such. We didn't know what it was at the time. But somehow, folks worked their way through it.

My suggestion, stay away from medicine as much as you can. There are always side effects regardless of what you take. So the less you take the better. You only have one body to go through life. Treat it with care.

And be sure that you are getting good professional help. Compare between drug happy doctors and those who do not prescribe drugs but use alternate methods/solutions. Then make your decision.

Good luck in your decision process.
 
Iscariot said:
There are other causes of short term memory loss, including depression, sleep apnea, lyme disease, MS, vitamin B12 deficiency, side-effects from other medication, and a litany of other less likely causes. Before committing to treatment for ADHD or ADD, you should see a doctor to explore potential medical conditions that are causing your memory loss.
Click to expand...

Don't forget pregnancy and having small children, but that's most likely not the problem in your case. :p

In any case, I'd also recommend getting a second opinion to verify the results and then decide what's more important to you.

sushi, I agree with the meds, and the same could be said for a lot of other conditions. That really hit home when I was prescribed anti-depressants when I wasn't sleeping well. The meds certainly have their place and are beneficial to some people, I just think that we use them too freely these days to treat symptoms without really thinking about the underlying problems.
 
floriflee said:
sushi, I agree with the meds, and the same could be said for a lot of other conditions. That really hit home when I was prescribed anti-depressants when I wasn't sleeping well. The meds certainly have their place and are beneficial to some people, I just think that we use them too freely these days to treat symptoms without really thinking about the underlying problems.
Click to expand...
Completely agree with the last sentence.

I've seen so many folks taking too many meds without fixing the underlying conditions. Start out with one pill a day and end up taking many more per day. Prescriptions that continue to grow for a lack of a better term.

Yet the problem still exists for some.

It seems some doctors are drug happy in that they do a quick analysis and then prescribe some sort of medicine they believe (remember it's called a practice for a reason) will work.

On a side note, doctors from different cultures approach the same issue in very different ways as well.

Medicine is far from an exact science. We all are different and react differently to the same medication.

Bottom line, IMHO, the fewer drugs the better.
 
You might want to get yourself tested to see if you have a gluten allergy, or some other food allergy. I read somewhere that some scientists have found a link between AD(H)D and certain food allergies (I can't find the article now, but I'll keep looking).
 
sushi said:
To the OP:

AFAIK, folks have had ADD and ADHD for a long time.

Only recently was it diagnosed. Now it seems everyone has it. Yet, I am sure if we went back a 100 years ago, many folks would have had it then as well, only we wouldn't have diagnosed it as such. We didn't know what it was at the time. But somehow, folks worked their way through it.

My suggestion, stay away from medicine as much as you can. There are always side effects regardless of what you take. So the less you take the better. You only have one body to go through life. Treat it with care.

And be sure that you are getting good professional help. Compare between drug happy doctors and those who do not prescribe drugs but use alternate methods/solutions. Then make your decision.

Good luck in your decision process.
Click to expand...

OnceUGoMac said:
It is so over-diagnosed that unless you are being hindered in some way, skip it.
Click to expand...

Co-sign on these 2 post as well, I had this teacher who would make the self-proclaimed ADHD kid run a few laps before settling down in class. He wasn't very hyper active after that. ;p

But like someone had mentioned already, the internet, especially a forum like this isn't the best place to be seeking medical/psychiatric advice.
 
sushi said:
To the OP:

AFAIK, folks have had ADD and ADHD for a long time.

Only recently was it diagnosed. Now it seems everyone has it. Yet, I am sure if we went back a 100 years ago, many folks would have had it then as well, only we wouldn't have diagnosed it as such. We didn't know what it was at the time. But somehow, folks worked their way through it.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I think the world has changed a lot, and we live in such a straight-arrow, linear society that being a bit "different" has a lot of disadvantages, and automatically makes you a part of fringe society. Thinking different also makes it harder to keep a job, because you're just looked at as someone who's too different to mesh with other people in the group. :eek:

"Everyone is different." Bull****. People are so much alike nowadays that anyone who stands out a bit is looked at funny. It's sad.

I have ADD and technically, there is nothing wrong with being ADD. How can there be something wrong with the way I think? It's the way I think!! However, the linear and structured thinkers built our society the way it is, and non-linear thinkers seem to have been left out of how things operate.

So again, there's nothing wrong with being ADD. There's only something wrong with ADD in our society because of the way it's structured. Without this structure, there wouldn't be ADD, because there wouldn't be a correct way of going about things.
 
sushi said:
To the OP:

AFAIK, folks have had ADD and ADHD for a long time.

Only recently was it diagnosed. Now it seems everyone has it. Yet, I am sure if we went back a 100 years ago, many folks would have had it then as well, only we wouldn't have diagnosed it as such. We didn't know what it was at the time. But somehow, folks worked their way through it.

My suggestion, stay away from medicine as much as you can. There are always side effects regardless of what you take. So the less you take the better. You only have one body to go through life. Treat it with care.

And be sure that you are getting good professional help. Compare between drug happy doctors and those who do not prescribe drugs but use alternate methods/solutions. Then make your decision.

Good luck in your decision process.
Click to expand...

I'm gonna put a little twist on what you're saying. ADD and ADHD never existed, and never will exist. Doctors INVENTED them in recent years as a way to clone and control kids who weren't willing to think like everyone else.

To the OP: Stay away from anything that a western doctor will give you. They are criminals.
 
Don Bagles said:
I'm gonna put a little twist on what you're saying. ADD and ADHD never existed, and never will exist. Doctors INVENTED them in recent years as a way to clone and control kids who weren't willing to think like everyone else.
Click to expand...

I guess it's ok to say that when you don't know how it feels. It's kind of like depression, dyslexia, and all those other inventions, right?


Just found out 2 hours ago (at a bar) that a friend's friend, who suffered from depression, just hung himself last week. But hey, there was never a real problem. Depression is just something doctors made up to sell more drugs.
 
Abstract said:
I guess it's ok to say that when you don't know how it feels. It's kind of like depression, dyslexia, and all those other inventions, right?


Just found out 2 hours ago (at a bar) that a friend's friend, who suffered from depression, just hung himself last week. But hey, there was never a real problem. Depression is just something doctors made up to sell more drugs.
Click to expand...

It's a whole lot more complicated than what I can write here in an online discussion. Why don't you do some research yourself? Among the astonishing facts that you'll discover, you will even begin to consider the possibility that the doctors caused the man's death.

America in 2007 = Germany in 1930.
 
You don't believe me when I say that America in 2007 = Germany in 1930, and then you ask yourself "Why didn't the people in Nazi Germany realize what was happening before it was too late?"
 
Wow.

So...
I would think this to be a chemistry and emotion question, not a political/societal one. Science and perception, buddy. Did you take your meds this morn? :)

We're all different. Every individual's chemistry is different, and the effects of a chemical/med in that system is going to be different. To the OP, I was very concerned about manipulating my personality due to meds. The end result, for me at least, was that my type A personality is now an A-minus, and I am pretty happy about that. You will not know anything unless you try...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back