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Welcome, @natebot88!
You’re very lucky to have been diagnosed so young, because your future is almost limitless. It’s very different for people who find out they have it when they’re 50 (or 70), and wonder how different their life could have been, if only they’d known.
You’re now at a stage of life where you’re going through a lot of growing. And those stages are when ADHD symptoms can flare up more than usual.
ADHD is something that affects everyone in your family, even if you’re the only one diagnosed with it, so they need to learn all about it, too.
So please do the adult thing and share all this with your parents. Believe it or not, they really do want to help you!
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The thing to remember about meds for mental issues is that they’re never one-size-fits-all, so what works for one person won’t necessarily work for the next person. So the only way to find what works for YOU is for you and your doctor to carefully try the lowest dose of one med for a few weeks, then get together, assess how well it treated your symptoms, and then adjust the dose and repeat the process.
But if you had a bad reaction to that first med, your doctor would probably change you to a different med, at the lowest dose, and you’ll repeat the process.
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It’s really hard to remember what you did each day, for the several weeks between appointments, so you’ll need to keep a basic “medication tracker” journal, every day.
Write down:
The med. and the dose.
What time you took it.
Any good effects you noticed.
Any bad effects you noticed.
Any external factors that could have affected your mood & functioning that day (for example: a big test at school, a really fun dance class, an argument with your family).
Bring this journal with you each time you see your doctor. That way, you and your doctor will be able to see just how effectively the prescribed med & dosage have been working for you during the trial period.
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Right now, you’ve just started taking Adderall. The effect was really dramatic on the first day, because it was totally new. The second day, the effect wasn’t as dramatic, and on the third day, you hardly noticed it at all. Once you get used to an ADHD med, you might think it’s stopped working, because it feels like nothing at all.
But your family, friends, and teachers might see things differently. They might notice a big improvement in how well you’re working & playing. We ADD’ers often have trouble seeing ourselves as others do, so we often miss things about ourselves that are very obvious to others.
And that “crash & burn” as the meds wear off is something we all go through. There are ways to minimize or postpone it, but that’s something to discuss with your doctor, later. Right now, the most important thing is to find the med & dose that’s best for you now.
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Another important thing to remember about ADHD meds is, they’re like training wheels. They’ll help you learn what you have to do to help yourself to function at your best, but you’ll still need to do the work yourself.
And you can’t fix all of your symptoms & struggles at once. You need to decide which 2 are the ones that cause you the most trouble, and work on JUST those 2. Figure out WHEN & WHY they seem to flare up. Once you understand them, you can plan how to deal with them, so they aren’t as big a problem. As you get used to understanding them and dealing with them, you’ll be able to control them more than they can control you. Not all the time, but enough of the time.
Once you’ve mastered the first two symptoms this way, you can move onto the next 2, and deal with them the same way, and then the next 2, and so on.
Just keep taking little steps like that, and they’ll really add up. You’ll still have ups and downs, but the ups will be better and the downs won’t be so bad.
You’ll be working on this for the rest of your life (Yipes!), but it’s worth it because YOU’RE worth it!
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