Re: How did YOU find the help you needed? What's your story?

[Anonymous]

@Bobcat665,

I’m just at the beinging of my journey, but I’ll fill in as much as possible. As things progress I’ll update ok.

1. I kinda fell into this backwards. My youngest son was indentified with ADD inatentive, and both my wife and myself have been working on getting support for him within the classsroom. The school board tested him in grade 3 but we didn’t feel that he was suffering from just ADD. After no success we finally were forced to go the private route for more testing. Turns out he also has a moderate learning dissability as well. Newly armed we set about researching things that would help my son cope with his ADD (his LD is very similar to ADD). When we found this site, we knew we had hit the jackpot. While watching the video, the penny dropped. I was like that too. I took a day or two to get the nerve up to do the online test, but when I did I scored high enough to convince me that I needed to get tested as well.

2. Given that me youngest son was ADD, we took another look at my oldest son and felt that we needed to have him accessed too. We used the same psychologist as with my youngest boy. During the first accessment appointment I spoke to the Dr. and asked if he knew of anyone that dealt with adult ADD and he offered to test me as well. I know lots of members here have had bad experiences with their Docs but this man has been an absolute god send. Without him I feel that we would out in the weeds so to speak.

3. Psychologist.

4. Because we had used him already we only waited a few weeks from first phone call to first visit (my oldest and me). Even with my youngest I still remember that we waited maybe a month tops. There was a time period of a few months (Jan. to May) until we actually phoned to book the appointment so lets call it four months total. Did anything happen during this time. Hell yes! It was like someone walked up and handed me a list of all the things that never quite panned out in my life and written on the bottom was “because you have ADD!!!!!”. I was mad at my mom and teachers. This was uncalled for, they didn’t even test regularly for this during that time. I’m 45 yrs old now, and ADD just didn’t get the attention back in the 70’s. To them I was just a daydreamer who often zoned out in class (hence the name so_calvin). This thankfully lasted just a few weeks, but it was replaced by depression. For a couple of months I just stopped living my life. I went to work, ate and slept and hid out in cyberspace playing an online game. This was a few months of my life gone for nothing, and I’m still really not sure how I came back to the real world.

5. The Dr. had me and my wife do a questionnaire (Conners Adult Long – self and observers). This confirmed I did have it. Because we kinda tacked me onto my son’s appointments there is some more testing that can be done to better identify subtype and such. These I’ll be getting done next January, because I need to wait till then for benifits to reset. As of right now time spent has been about an hour. This was both filling out the questionnaire and an interview with the Dr. Given what I know of the process that my sons went through there should be a couple more hours to come. I’ll need to get back to you as I go through it.

6. No meds yet. This is one of the areas we need to explore more. As above I’ll update as I progress.

7. No coaching yet. The good news is that given the experience with my sons I’ve been able to use tactics we have been working on with them. Of course there is this forum as well, I check back regularly and consider this a valuable use of cyberspace.

Sorry for the length of this (Why do ADDers write posts that are soooo long?), hope you find some of this helpful.

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