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Hi thread, just got diagnosed with ADHD at age 36 and am on Ritalin and holy gently caress it's life changing. I was pretty strongly in denial about maybe having it since my life has been p decent up until now (got through undergrad and then a master's and a PhD with what seemed like no unstoppable issues) but prodding from my wife basically made me connect all the dots (holy gently caress are there a lot of dots in retrospect) and see a psychiatrist for testing. I basically scored in the 20th percentile for attention and impulsivity in the go/no-go task and finally decided that maybe there was something to it after all.
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Jun 6, 2017 01:19
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:53 |
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Yeah, that's what happened to me. My primary care gave me a screening test and a referral, and I went to an adult ADHD specialist (which exists because Bay Area, I guess) and I got diagnosed from there. FWIW, I had a similar track - did well enough in highschool and college to go to grad school despite being totally unable to focus on study, and got through my PhD mostly in short bursts of hyperfocus with long periods of weeks going by staring at the internet. I'm in a situation now where I *have* to do poo poo because my career depends on it, so I took the plunge to see if there was something more wrong at age 35. No regrets.
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Jul 25, 2017 00:45
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Mechafunkzilla posted:I'd strongly advise working with a therapist on the process of being diagnosed and treated, rather than your GP. A therapist can't diagnose you and your gp will refer you either to a clinical psychologist for formal diagnosis or a psychiatrist for diagnosis and medical treatment.
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Jul 25, 2017 04:10
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Mechafunkzilla posted:A clinical psychologist is a type of therapist. This is true, but not all therapists are clinical psychologists. It's an important distinction, because a non credentialed therapist is neither equipped to or can give you a recognized clinical diagnosis.
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Jul 25, 2017 16:00
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Mechafunkzilla posted:A "non credentialed therapist" can't practice. . This isn't true of all countries, and isn't even true of all states in the U.S. "Therapist" may or may not be a protected legal term and the person calling themselves a therapist may or may not have qualifications. Even in the situations where it is a protected term, "therapists" can range from clinical psychologists to social workers. Moreover, my MSc is in psychology and my PhD is too, since it's from a psychology department even though it was actually in neuroscience. There's no way I would make a clinical diagnosis, because I'm not trained to do so. I sure as hell wouldn't trust a person with a master's in social work to offer an accurate clinical diagnosis any more than I would trust a GP to do so. By all means, work with a therapist on behavioral and coping strategies for ADHD, they'll probably be useful. If an accurate diagnosis is what you want in the first instance, why not cut out the middleman and see a medical professional who specialises in mental health about it? While there's no "legal guideline" for diagnosis, the DSM exists for a reason. SuperiorColliculus fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 00:11
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Do what you want man, I was happy seeing a psychiatrist for diagnosis and recommend the same to others. It meant my diagnosing doctor could prescribe treatment and had experience with managing that medication.
SuperiorColliculus fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 00:46
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I was lucky in that the first drug my doctor prescribed (Ritalin) seems to be working out for me at the lowest dose (5mg). It doesn't change my perception at all except it lets me tune out anything that I'm not currently doing. Note that it's not a "makes me able to focus only on one thing" - I can just kind of turn down the volume on irrelevant stuff that's happening or thoughts I'm having. I would definitely recommend seeking a professional diagnosis and at least considering medication - unlike most mental health issues ADHD almost universally responds to at least one of the drugs available for it.
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Aug 15, 2017 22:53
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The brain being plastic also means that over time the weak dopaminergic projections from the basal ganglia to the frontal cortex get more robust as you hyperactivate them. There's good evidence for reaching an effective dose/response steady state for most people.
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Aug 17, 2017 16:04
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Tolerance to one will tend to crossbleed into the others, since they're by and large mostly dopaminergic agonists - methylphenidate blocks the DA (and NE) reuptake channel while the amphetamines do this and also force vesicular release of dopamine. The end result of both is that the postsynaptic cell will respond to increased dopamine by endocytosing dopamine receptors and depotentiating them.
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Aug 18, 2017 23:52
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There's a decent (~0.3) effect size for omega-3 supplementation too, so maybe consider that. Apparently ones with a higher epa/dha ratio are better iirc
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Aug 21, 2017 21:47
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It's weird that you are happy to accept unsubstantiated anecdata about heavy metals in the water causing ADHD, but you're derisive of actual science that demonstrates a (small) effect size for DHA/EHA omega-3 oils (commonly found in fish) in reducing the severity of ADHD symptoms.
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Sep 21, 2017 00:02
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We've got pretty good data for there being several clear biological differences associated with ADHD patients compared to the general population (the most obvious one being polymorphisms of the dopamine transporter), so we understand it reasonably well mechanistically. In fact, it's one of the best understood mental illnesses. Diagnosis on the other hand, is a different proposition. Still, there are statistically significant differences from gen pop (this is the basis for the DSM, after all).
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Sep 21, 2017 00:25
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Yeah, statistics eh? Since when were they good for anything? /E with less sarcasm - the criteria it sets out are such that people scoring above a certain threshold are significantly outside of the normal range. It's a blunt tool, but it's all we realistically have for now. SuperiorColliculus fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Sep 21, 2017 |
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Sep 21, 2017 03:01
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No kidding, but those criteria inform a diagnosis based on their suggesting a significant deviation from the mean. Obviously other tests will then be used (I was impressed my psychiatrist used a modified go/no-go and was equally shocked to score in the 20th percentile for inhibition of response) but you can't administer costly and time consuming tests on everything without first determining there's an abberation from normal.
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Sep 21, 2017 16:06
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There's an existing mindfulness meditation eeg headband on the market called muse. There's definitely reason to believe mindfulness meditation might be useful, as one of the deficits in ADHD is lack of spectral coherence between various regions of basal ganglia with pfc compared to control. I'd consider it a solid "maybe" and probably worth trying out if you can afford to potentially waste $200 as an adjunct to medication.
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Oct 3, 2017 19:22
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Not really, there's ample evidence that it's useful for improving executive control and attention. I'm not meaning to disagree entirely; I'm just a weird intersection of someone who has adult ADHD and a neuroscientist, so I've done my homework here.
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Oct 3, 2017 20:27
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I assume these will be mostly paywalled, but you'll be able to read the abstracts at least https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/8/1/85/1694475/Meditation-mindfulness-and-executive-control-the https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3563089/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10608-007-9119-0 etc, etc... those are just the first few off the first page of google scholar.
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Oct 4, 2017 04:07
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What can I say? There's strong but not unequivocal evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness meditation in improving executive control. There's equally strong or somewhat stronger evidence for the efficacy of stimulants, there's weaker evidence for CBT, and there's even weaker (but still convincing, IMO) evidence for EHA/DHA supplementation. FWIW, My psychiatrist (who is an exclusive specialist in adult ADHD, because bay area) recommended both mindfulness meditation (via muse no less) and EHA/DHA supps in addition to stimulants.
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Oct 4, 2017 04:48
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It doesn't have to have had to be advantageous, it just has to be not disadvantageous enough to confer a reproductive penalty. Genetic diversity in a species is a strength that enables it to survive changing environments, so lots of traits that are not "advantageous" are kept around. Evolution isn't directed toward better, it's directed toward "performs optimally in this niche" You can make some evo psyc argument that some ADHD traits are useful (ability to hyperfocus, attention to other stimuli that might be overlooked by others) but realistically, it's around because it doesn't harm reproductive fitness to be around (so far). The science of the genetics is really interesting; 23&me give you access to the raw SNP data and companies like promethease let you cross reference that data with SNPedia which associates the research on specific polymorphisms with certain phenotypes. ADHD is unsurprisingly associated with SNPs on the dopamine transporter sequence, amongst others.
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Feb 22, 2018 16:34
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Huh, I actually... Don't know. I'm not a geneticist I'm more of a neurophysiologist. I would say it's something like "obligatory genotypical" or something. I can ask my dev bio friend today - I hazard she knows.
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Feb 22, 2018 17:03
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In my experience you might habituate a little, but the "can now unfuck my poo poo" ability never does. I'm on Adderall though, so YMMV. I wish I had it during my PhD, but I would have eaten poo poo during this postdoc if I hadn't finally gone "this can't be right, I need to do this but I physically can't"
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May 4, 2018 16:25
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:53 |
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MJP posted:
My GP prescribed it to me off label for ADHD before my actual diagnosis. My experience was initially miraculous (for focus, I was never depressed so can't comment on that), but I quickly habituated to a point where I didn't notice any effect. Adding Adderall to it brought back the effect. Turns out I'm just super sensitive to stimulants; I take a 5mg dose of Adderall and haven't had to increase since to maintain the effect.
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Dec 5, 2018 19:52
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