My oldest son was diagnosed with ADHD and a few other issues when he was a baby. Dealing with him has been a challenge and we have had to use several different parenting methods when it comes to keeping him focused on his school work and chores. He was a handful when he was a toddler, he was like dealing with 2 or 3 kids at a time. The minute you turned your back for a few seconds, the boy was into something. As a mom, I was hoping that he would grow out of it or learn some coping skills so that he could be successful in life. When he was younger, he was treated with Stratera and his doctor later took him off of it due to increased risk of suicide. So today we use a very small dose of blood pressure medication to help him sleep at night. This has worked great over the years. Sleep is very important and if he wasn’t taking the medication he would be up half of the night and get up before the crack of dawn.
Today, I wanted to share an anonymous story on how ADHD has affected someone who has dealt with ADHD for a majority of his life, including adulthood.
Disclosure: This post is for informational purposes only. If you or your child struggle with ADHD, please see your doctor for more information and treatment options. Please call 911 in the event of an emergency or if you or your child is threatening to harm themselves.
I’ve lived my entire life with attention deficit hyper activity disorder, which is commonly known as ADHD, or sometimes just ADD. I’ve heard every joke about being hyper or unable to pay attention, I’ve experienced every sort of doctor, and I’ve come out the other side – successfully – in spite of my condition and/or what others may have thought or said. I’m living with ADHD, and you can too.
The problem with ADHD, besides the common ignorance that most people share when it comes to understanding the condition, is that it’s not the same in all people. That means that my ADHD could be very different from your ADHD. Because it’s such a hard thing for most people to understand, I want to clear up some misconceptions about the disorder, and life with ADHD.
Medication Can’t Fix ADHD
My first foray into ADHD drugs was as a child, when a doctor prescribed me Ritalin. This worked for a while, but as I reached my late teens and left for college I found that it was no longer doing the trick. I started seeing a counselor to see if there were additional drugs that I should be taking, and I discovered the yin to my yang at an online directory called Therapy Tribe. Finding ADHD counselors at TherapyTribe.com was actually a pretty simple undertaking, and after finding my new counselor, I learned that drugs could only take me so far. The rest of my journey was going to have to be through behavioral modification.
