Re: Worst advice – and from a therapist, no less.

[Curlymoe115]

I saw a psychiatrist for about a year. He knew that I had ADHD as a child yet instead of connecting A to B he threw in about 20 other disorders I fitted as well. In his office the files were piled on the floor in huge stacks, there was general clutter everywhere and he always had to be reminded who I was before we would begin the session. Then he spend a few minutes finding my file. He prescribed 30 different medications and combinations to the point where I was just about comatose with the combinations. I wasn’t functioning I was existing. When I would inquire about any other form of therapy (he had mentioned some things to help me get past the anxieties and compulsions) he would always put this off until after I was stabilized on medication. This was a teaching professor at a Canadian teaching University.

But you will be happy to know that I could probably get a life long pension from my myriad of disorders and get paid to stay home for the rest of my life. I still live in my hoarders dream house, still have a problem with large crowds of people (too many conversations, can’t hear any one person), still am compulsed to do things in certain ways, over and over again, still get really angry if I am hyperfocused and am interrupted, and on and on. So I am a bi-polar (I get excited and often run off without a plan with the utter conviction that this will succeed without any thought of consequence, and I have had some depressed episodes), I am obsessive compulsive, I have social anxieties, I suffer from many other disabilities that can all really be traced back to my ADHD yet in all of these diagnosis he never mentioned adult ADHD. He suggested that I go out into crowded shopping and social situations so that I could adjust to them. When I reported back that I just feel overwhelmed he would suggest that I just keep trying.

Of course I stopped all the medications and while I still suffer from my condition (but nothing improved with the meds just felt like my head was a balloon and it was floating disconnected from everything), I am at least happier. When my oldest daughter was diagnosed with ADHD we were not surprised. She also suffers from a variety of other mental illnesses that multiply the symptoms of her ADHD. She was put onto Dexedrine when she was in day care. She was taking a very high dosage for her condition. She was extremely disruptive in the regular classroom and in grade 1 was moved to a special behaviour based classroom. There were 6 kids in a class with 2 behavioural aids. The person who ran this program was a Psychiatric Nurse who would say he could tell what type of day our daughter would have by what she looked like when she got to school. He insisted on having a bottle of her prescription and would give her pills if he thought she had missed them. Then he started reporting that she was often in “sillyland” for the rest of the day, and instead of focusing she would be disassociated for the day and had to be placed in time out. Turns out that what she was was high. This 50 lb child was getting twice the spansule of Dexedrine (4 instead of 2) and was therefore stoned. When, in consultation with her pediatrician, we weaned her off the medication they actually reported us to social services and took us to court to try to force us to put her back on the medication. After we were finally vindicated for taking her off the medication they tried to black ball our daughter from ever being mainstreamed even though her behaviour had stabilized. We literally moved our family across the country to get her into a mainstream program. The consequences of the medication are still being felt. She now uses drugs and alcohol to try and replicate the feelings of silly land.

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