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That’s about how long it works for me. I take 30 mg three times a day with great results. I used to take Adderall and similar instant-release generics, but they would never last even four hours. I spent more time crashing than focusing!
Talk to your doctor – and best of luck.
REPORT ABUSEI’m cheering for both of you, though a touch envious about your optimism. I pretty much gave up working 10 or 15 years ago because I did not trust myself enough to allow anyone to rely on me to get necessary tasks done.
REPORT ABUSEColdhandedman, I quite definitely have ADD – and a memory like yours. When I was young, it really seemed to be photographic. For example, in addition to remembering printed text that I’d read much earlier (sometimes years), I’d also remember that it was on the lower left-hand page about a third of the way through a two-inch-thick book with a slightly frayed red cover. I no longer have an excellent memory, but I do still have what my husband and I call “lint”, bits of stuff that stick for no apparent reason, exactly like your thing behind the garbage. It is usually the location of something that someone else is looking for. I have much less luck with my own stuff.
REPORT ABUSEIt is quite common for depression and/or anxiety to accompany ADD. All my ADDled friends and family members have depression, and several have anxiety too. (I’m not saying “are depressed” or “are anxious” because I don’t want anyone to confuse mood disorders with temporary, situationally appropriate feelings.)
“Comorbidity” is the clustering together of symptoms of more than one problem in the same person. It has been estimated by some ADD professionals that 85% of adult ADD patients have at least one comorbid condition. (Info hastily cribbed from the 2011 160-page “Canadian ADHD Practice Guidelines” published by the Canadian Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Resource Alliance or”CADDRA”.)
REPORT ABUSEBlackdog, I might have to pit your cell phone story with mine, putting it through the wash. Not because it was in a pocket I forgot to empty, mind you, but because I knocked it into the washing machine and never noticed until the dryer started clunking.
But I may have trumped my own story. I had a device on my car’s windshield, a transponder that emitted a signal whenever I drove through a traffic monitoring area. It allowed me to drive the 75 mph (120 kph) speed limit without slowing to pay highway tolls. Then I decided to donate that old vehicle to my local public radio station in exchange for a small tax deduction. I remembered that I’d forgotten to remove that transponder, which still belongs to the highway authority, until few days after the car was towed away, too late to retrieve it.
3:30 pm, time to change out of my pajamas.
REPORT ABUSEI’m not sure whether you’re talking about dating/sex partners or life choices. Either way, one person is certainly easier than juggling several, unless they are all one-night stands, in which case you’re cheating yourself out of interpersonal everything. Serial monogamy works for some people, too (as long as they don’t have to marry and divorce). I did lots, from hooking up for a few hours to living with a partner for a few years.
Novel concept: Perhaps people should be free to do whatever works for them, as long as they are honest about it.
But I don’t think “theory” is the best label for belief in permanent coupleship. Many historical customs, religions, social and political organizations have heavily influenced that pattern. Perhaps for some, societies moving from extended-family group quarters to mobile single-family domiciles created a concern about how to provide children with sufficient socialization to become healthy adults. If/when a woman has children, she could likely use the help of at least one other adult with a personal interest in the offspring. And a bunch of monogamous couples are probably (at least theoretically) simpler to govern.
Most likely because I was raised without religion, I’ve never felt pressured to marry, or to be monogamous, nor did I grow up expecting to ever have a permanent mate. In fact, the very idea of living with one person forever filled me with horror. How would I ever deal with the boredom that would surely set in almost immediately? I had a hard time spending more than a few hours with anybody, no matter how much I liked him or her.
I ended up falling into a relationship that didn’t bore me, then when I was 62, we began to call ourselves married so I could share his health care plan. We have an uncommon relationship, though. We both are wildly ADD, which is sometimes advantageous and sometimes disastrous. We are both smart, highly verbal, well-educated (at least in our own minds!), each of us usually able to “win” encounters with others. We both hate noisy environments – emotional or physical, and need long stretches of time alone to read, daydream or socialize with others.
Shortly after we met and realized just how complementary our psyches were, we made a pact not to yell at or belittle one another. We have never had a single fight in 15 years. We disagree plenty, argue fairly often and get pretty competitive sometimes – but NEVER insult or degrade each other. And I never get bored.
One thing I can tell the sexy young, footloose and fancy-free: Going out hunting for companionship can get old – and exhausting – as one ages and responsibilities take their toll. Also, there is something to be said for having someone who is tickled to see you even at your ugliest!
REPORT ABUSELarynxa,
Thank you for this info! Coincidentally, I exchanged a few messages with Joanna Martin at Springboard after I enquired as to whether Ainslie Gray still practiced or was now just focused on executive activities. I live a couple blocks south of the Springboard office, a couple blocks north of Bloor.You’re not the first to suggest a fresh-out-of-med-school family doctor, not only for appointment availability but also for exposure to more current education about things like ADD.
What I’d love to have is a list of attendees of all the local family doctors who use CADDRA’s “Canadian ADHD Practice Guidelines” or have attended any of the programs about them. That sounds like an ideal pool of doctors who have self-selected to learn about ADHD/ADD to use that education in their primary care practices.
hullupoika,
The hand-signed, paper (not electronic) prescription containing the doctor’s DEA # and showing of ID are actual legal requirements in the US. The restriction to a single month and the pill bottle/pill-counting ritual are not legal requirements but are your doctor’s exercising caution. They are not unusual, especially if the patient is new to stimulant drugs, new to the doctor’s practice, or somehow appearing to be a risk for misusing them.Stimulants are Schedule II Controlled Substances, along with most narcotics. Neither Zoloft nor Xanax are subject to that level of regulation.
REPORT ABUSEMy request is even more basic than honda’s: Can anyone give me a suggestion for a particular family doctor in Toronto? Preferably one with a sympathetic ear for the ADDled, but I am really hoping to find good all-around primary care. I am downtown, but am open to anyone accessible by public transportation.
I know how to find all the official lists of doctors; what I’m looking for are recommendations based on personal experience. I’d be so grateful to anyone generous enough to give me a name or two.
REPORT ABUSESounds like you’ve successfully developed some coping strategies, jasoco! I think most ADDers have at least a few to help manage our wildly diverse symptoms. My husband has to file or pile everything neatly in order to avoid being lost among all the things competing for his attention. I, on the other hand, am afraid of straightening anything up, because once something is in a file or a neat pile, I immediately forget everything that isn’t immediately visible. Makes for some interesting times in our house. We have opposite methods of coping with our forgetfulness and procrastination (NB: I just spent ten minutes trying to remember the word “procrastinate”; then I gave up and used Google.)
If you had really grown out of it, you probably would not have to set multiple alarms and force yourself to go to required meetings. Having ADD isn’t a character flaw. laziness or weakness of will; it’s a physiological, neurological condition for which some people are lucky or persistent enough to manage with medication. Others don’t take drugs, but find other therapies useful.
Don’t beat yourself up about it, but please take advantage of the college’s offer of accommodation. You don’t have to use it when it’s not necessary, but it would be terrible if you found yourself unable to complete a paper or exam on time and did not have a documented justifiable reason to ask for deadline flexibility.
My husband’s severely-ADD daughter thought everything was fine when she finally ended up at a college (her third, after four high schools) and in an arts major at which she excelled – to her own amazement. But several competing projects left her suddenly unable to prioritize anything, even eating and sleeping. Luckily, in addition to meds, she had a request for accommodation on file with the school, and was able to use it effectively – after never taking advantage of it for two years – to get an additional week to get her work sorted out and completed.
It sounds like your college is inviting you to document your situation. If it were me, I’d take them up on it, even if it took a bit of effort to get it done.
Good luck – and please let us know how it goes!
REPORT ABUSEHmmm. My apology actually IS the link!
REPORT ABUSEThis law trumps patient privacy laws. From the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care website, Public Information section:
Section 8 of the Act permits the Minister and the Executive Officer to direct a prescriber (e.g., doctor, dentist), a dispenser (e.g., pharmacist) or an operator of a pharmacy to disclose information about the monitored drugs they prescribe or dispense, to the Minister or the Executive Officer. For example, the Minister and the Executive Officer may direct the disclosure of information regarding:
the prescriber of the monitored drug (name, address, registration number),
the person for whom the monitored drug is prescribed (name, address, date of birth, gender, unique number appearing on a form of identification listed on the ministry’s website), and
the monitored drug itself (name, strength, quantity, length of therapy, directions for use, drug identification number, prescription number, date of prescription, date of dispensing).In addition, if a person who has been prescribed a monitored drug authorizes someone else to pick up the drug from a dispenser, the Minister or the Executive Officer may direct a dispenser to disclose certain personal information about that person to the Minister or the Executive Officer (i.e. the person’s name and address, and the distinguishing number appearing on a form of identification that verifies the person’s name and address).
Once this information has been collected, the Minister and Executive Officer may only use or disclose it as permitted or required by the Act, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and the Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004. For example, subsection 5(5) of the Act permits the Minister and the Executive Officer to disclose personal information about a person who has been prescribed a monitored drug, to a prescriber, a dispenser or an operator of a pharmacy who has prescribed or dispensed such a drug to the person in the past.
You’re right; doctors don’t have access, but the gub’mint does. The clearest thing I’ve read is the monitoring FAQ at
Sorry if I’ve botched the HTML again.
REPORT ABUSEActually, legally every doctor has to comply. Trying to figure out how to get health care in Ontario (saving that for my next post)- mainly for ADD, but other issues too – I went to the Ministry of Health’s website and read the whole law that was passed at that time, as well as all the information posted about it. (I tried to post a link to it, but botched it, posting an apparent link to a bunch of text instead.) It is intended to make every prescription identifiable by doctor, pharmacy, patient, and anyone else who might pick it up. Hence, the both doctor and pharmacy are required to get ID, and the doctor has to record some other things like a diagnosis.
Another purpose of the law is to snag people who are getting too much of the controlled substances, either by going to multiple doctors, filling prescriptions too soon. Or too LATE, perhaps on the theory that if you can go longer than the designated interval to refill, you didn’t really need so much to begin with. I wonder if having ADD and constantly forgetting can actually get one in legal hot water?
REPORT ABUSEIn all three US states I’ve lived in over the last 20 years or so, my doctors always gave me three=month prescriptions unless I was trying a new drug and we did not yet know how it would affect me. I’d get a one-month prescription, then three if it worked out. I did see one doctor – just once! – who required a $200 office visit every month, even though I was only trying to maintain a med regime that had been working for me for years. At the time, I had insurance that would have paid most of his fee, but I wasn’t willing to feed his habit.
BTW, the retail cost of Vyvanse is horrendous; 30 days of 30 mg runs $225 and up!
REPORT ABUSEI’ve never used Quillivant (methylphenidate, like Ritalin), but some anti-ADD and anti-depressant meds do that to my husband. He takes two things to counteract the rage: lamotrigine (Lamictal), a mood stabilizer, and fluoxetine (Prozac), an SSRI antidepressant. The fluoxetine is the more useful; the lamotrigine keeps him active in spite of the fluoxetine! Depending on where you are, lamotrigine might be difficult to get, because this would be an off-label(not approved by the powers that be) use of it.
REPORT ABUSEMarch 23, 2015 at 2:56 pm in reply to: Interference From the College of Physicians & Surgeons #126824Sorry, I responded to your “Request for Advice” post before reading this. Where are you located? I found the Ontario monitoring criteria, looking for myself on the Ministry of Health site.
You might have filled a prescription too soon, gotten a dose increase they don’t approve of etc. You might try asking for Vyvanse, because it is formulated to help forestall abuse. The amphetamine effect kicks in only after it is digested. Or atomoxetine, a non-stimulant. Or the antidepressant bupropion, which help many ADDers.
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