Posted by Xevious on June 5, 2002, at 2:21:51
In reply to Re: Scared, but hopeful- I was just diagnosed with ADD, posted by katekite on June 4, 2002, at 13:13:47
Hmm… You sound almost like a long-lost sister, KateKite. (Leia… it’s true… our father was a lousy actor in those prequels…) Sorry, I’ll just stop that now. ;)
It took me eight years of bouncing between various psychiatrists, GPs, psychologists and therapists (I would see one for a while, then get frustrated and move on or discontinue entirely) before finally diagnosing myself as ADD. Unlike you, I *do* blame at least some of the docs that I saw – many of them seemed burned out and disinterested in my plight, and merely did their best to place me on a flowchart. Under ordinary (healthy) circumstances, I wouldn’t have given those docs the benefit of a return consultation, but when you’re otherwise occupied with depression or sickness (you know, like when you’re most likely to be seeing a doctor), chances are that you’re missing a couple handfuls of common sense. The really sad thing about apathetic docs is that people who don’t feel well are usually in need of a good dose of empathy; it’s too bad that so many doctors don’t take the time to learn such skills along the way.
I think the other unforgivable is the doctor who doesn’t believe in an illness like ADD or depression. Way back when I first suspected depression, I went to my long-standing family doc, spilled my guts, and was rewarded with a lecture on hypochondria and the stern advice that “there is no such thing as depression. It’s all in your head.” Well, DUH! ;) Again, normally, I would have seen a different doc the next day, but we’re still talking about depression here, and so it took me more like three months and an emotional breakdown to find a doc who actually reads the JAMA. Anyway, I went through the same crap just this year when I had my “oh dear lord, I’m Bart Simpson” moment – called two of my former pdocs; both told me that they didn’t believe in Adult ADD and that they would only be willing to prescribe Wellbutrin. Thank goodness this time I was only scatterbrained and not incapacitated by depression; it only took me a month to locate a specialist and undergo the neuro and psych screening.
By now the more perceptive of you may have noticed my lack of tolerance for apathetic medical practitioners. It comes from being a counseling psychology student on his way to a degree in neuroscience, if I ever keep myself on track for long enough to finish. ;) Empathy skills aren’t all that difficult to learn, and I just have issues with folks who are in the healing professions and don’t seem to care about the living, breathing, feeling people whom they are treating. But enough on that rant… Don’t want to wrestle Dennis Miller out of a job. ;)
I literally breezed through high school. Barely opened a book. In retrospect, I did it mainly by bending all of the rules (I’ve always been rather adept at that…); by the end of my second year, I had already taken all of the math and science courses that the school offered (those were the only ones that interested me at all), so I packed up and, under extreme protest from the district, started attending classes at the community college. That was fun – I only went to school half-time, and spent the rest of my days hanging out with friends, volunteering at the humane society and my veterinarian’s office, watching lots of Discovery Channel, holding down a part-time job and being generally productive. In retrospect, those were probably my most symptom-free years.
When I went off to a real university, my condition changed pretty abruptly. I found, somewhere in the middle of my Bachelor’s degree, that although I was still very enchanted with the *idea* of school, the actual reality of having to go to classes regularly, developing a study schedule and time management techniques, and – the worst – having to spend most of my precious attentional energy on play-acting that I was paying attention in order to keep the professor happy rather than doing whatever I needed to in order to actually *listen* (I should win an Oscar for how good I am at doing this these days) was really getting me down. Literally. Like as in “hello darkness, my old friend…”
I eventually graduated, but that was only because I decided that I wanted to pursue a graduate degree. So, after four years away from my very patient alma mater, I completed the remainder of my degree requirements in two months. And let me tell you – I just looove the people who ask me, “well, why didn’t you do that sooner?” Like I hadn’t ever considered the idea. Life is nothing if not ironic.
Anyway, I started out pre-med, then ended up pre-vet (couldn’t really understand humans after all; had natural pet empathy), then got side-tracked with biomedicine and wound up with a degree in computer science on account of the fact that I pulled down six figures during my junior year by doing some contracting in my spare time. (60 hours a week of “spare time,” that is… but those were 60 exciting, never-the-same-thing-twice spare hours) I left school to found my own business and kinda forgot about the whole degree thing.
The trouble with running a business when you’re ADD is you have soooo many mind-shatteringly great ideas but soooo precious few survive the cognitive process of putting them down on paper. Even those lucky few are inevitably doomed to live out the rest of their lives in a great heap of paper somewhere on your desk (or the floor, or on top of – not in – the filing cabinet) as by the time you’re done writing them down, you’ve already lost interest and abandoned them for the next fleeting stroke of genius.
None of which is a problem, really, considering the fact that you’d never have the energy or follow-through to actually implement one, start to finish!
Which brings us to the topic of financial ruin. Although I consider myself to be quite responsible with finances – I pay my bills on time, never overdraw the checkbook, frequently get paid hideously large amounts of money by employers in exchange for what amounts to playtime – my enthusiastic impulsivity with large, capital intensive endeavors (like that business, or the musicals that I produced and directed) has brought me repeatedly to the brink of capitalistic destruction. In fact, if I had a dime for every time I painted myself into a corner while following a dream, well, then I wouldn’t have had to worry about the problem I just mentioned. ;)
All in the life of the ADD affected person. And my recent crowning achievement? On an impulse, I left my formerly enjoyable position as a marketing engineer (the one that had me touring the globe, touting the majesty of our products at trade shows) for a supposedly similar, higher-paying job with another company because the former job had begun to get stale, what with our division loosing financing and our team being frozen and all. (Hey, I make carefully weighed (read: obsessive), impulsive decisions, hence the higher salary) Turns out that the new job was not at all as advertised and entailed me sitting in a cube all day authoring powerpoint presentations and word documents. Let’s just say that three months later, when I was laid off (along with about half of the company), it was like a mercy killing.
That was really the last straw. My depression had been returning, and what seemed to be a mounting pile of failure after failure was really haunting me. The letters read large on the billboard of my psyche: “The World Does Not Want You.” I was miserable. That was the trouble – I wasn’t the least bit suicidal, homicidal, or anything else involving an ounce of initiative. Just plain miserable. I didn’t do a thing, not a thing, for nearly an entire year. That’s not to say that I didn’t have a lot of ideas – I had loads of them. I just had given up, lost interest in competing, and turned to reading philosophy and watching old movies, barely living in a depressed, existential stupor. I’m a great actor, though; most of my friends thought I was fine, if a bit nocturnal.
Dear god, I’ve just typed a lot. Thanks for reading still. Sheesh. It's just that this stuff is fascinating to me - I used to think that I was a generic, uncategorizable freak; now I know exactly what kind of freak I am! ;)
So here I am now, a student again, barely, just barely making it through classes and homework, filing incompletes right and left, finishing three-month long assignments in the thin hours between 1:00 and 6:00 in the morning on the day that the (already extended) assignment is due, and somehow remaining first in my class with a perfect GPA. Around January, school brought me to my knees again, but thankfully, my very studies revealed to me my disorder.
I’ve tried Ritalin, Adderall and Dexedrine, and am currently on Adderall. My rich history of experimentation with a wide variety of antidepressants has actually come in handy; at least I know what they do to me and have no need to try them again! :) Out of the AD family, Prozac was my affect-enhancing friend, while Effexor and Wellbutrin had the best effects on my attentional symptoms. I have had great difficulty tolerating most medications, including the last two, and am quite thankful for the side-effect free, albeit incomplete relief that Adderall has been providing me. (Ritalin had little effect on my CNS and Dexedrine nearly put me to sleep) I figure that on Adderall, I can crawl through the rest of the school year, then experiment some more during the summer when there is less at stake. At that point, the cobwebs definitely need to be cleared out of my head.
To be honest, at this point, I still have almost zero direction, but I’m financially committed to school and find the subject matter most interesting, so I guess I’ll follow this path for now. I have absolutely no conception as to how I will ever find a career that will interest me for more than a few years, let alone the rest of my life. I think that this was the kind of dilemma that I was supposed to be going through six or ten years ago, but I was too busy making money and having fun back then! ;) This, I believe, will be the hardest challenge for me to face – me and my ADD vs. a world of rules, consequences, and some of the most closed-box thinkers you’ll ever meet!
-Steven
poster:Xevious
thread:107422
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020602/msgs/108734.html