Disclaimer: I’m referring the the US medical system, but I imagine people in other countries may encounter similar things.
I cannot be the only one who has had this experience, but all my dealings with the medical industry feel like they were refined by a group of psychologists to exploit the weaknesses of those with ADHD.
The volume of calls, appointments, and paperwork I had to full out to get a diagnosis and prescription for treatment is completely unreasonable to expect someone with poor working memory and attention issues to navigate.
Then, to stay on medication, you need to schedule and make appointments with a psychiatrist every month, for the rest of your life, and if you miss a single one, you will run out of meds (and likely charged a fine), which will make it even harder to remember to make the next one. If you miss too many, that psychiatrist will refuse to see you again and you have to go back to your PCP to get a new referral.
Look, I understand that their time is valuable, but this system couldn’t be designed any other way to be more accommodating to people who clinically forget things?!
It’s like designing a wheelchair ramp that’s actually just stairs that are 3x as steep as the regular stairs. Also, if you fall to the bottom, someone takes your wheelchair until you can climb back up.
I’ve been self medicating for decades with nicotine and THC. It works well for me. I guess I’m lucky.
THC helps a lot in very low doses (20mg or so) but I build a tolerance to it after 2-3 weeks, and also it makes me completely stupid. Its great for getting chores and shit done but terrible for my job. It also makes me really really wordy, which is kind of annoying for everyone involved.
This is one of the benefits of being on non-stimulant meds, the hoops to jump through are way less (I still had to fight insurance for a prior auth, which took nearly a month). I use an online Psychiatrist (Talkiatry) and have been really happy with my doctor. I also only need to see him as often as we think is medically necessary since atamoxetine can be refilled. It’s been shown in trials to be as effective as methylphenidate and works well for me so far.
The diagnostic piece though is indeed hard, but I can sort of understand that. It’s a pathway to drugs with a high probability of abuse, and no sure fire way to diagnose. So from a liability and care viewpoint I get why psychologists do due diligence in evaluating people (especially adults) for ADHD. It still sucks if you need help, but in theory you only have to deal with that process once to get a diagnosis. Also, as many people have pointed out, many PCPs are willing to fill scripts for controlled substances if needed, especially once you are on a stable dose that you know works. Like many things, the start up is the hardest and it gets easier once you hit steady state.
Shout out to all my spiritual siblings who skip days to stockpile meds because we live in a nightmare world.
Damn. I don’t know where you live but I live in VA and my pcp just refills my prescription every month. We check in via what are basically text mesages and I do telehealth visits every 3 months.
The shit that pisses me off is the 4 week refill time because over the span of several months the refill date and appointment date get out of sync. Just make it so you can’t fill more than three times in 90 days or whatever and it would accomplish the exact same shit but with way more flexibility.
maybe i got lucky, but my psychiatrist is private practice, and she lets me skip every other month and i just text to remind her to fill my meds. she’s great.
oh, and offered to see me quarterly because she is encouraging me to find a therapist and i told her my budget is too tight to add another bill.
…yeah, i think i got lucky.
Germany here. It’s kind of similar here. The system is rigged against us.
My strategy is to use medication to enable me to build a support structure and learn techniques that help with dealing with symptoms. E. g. meditation, physical exercises that help mind-body connection, CBT, routines, etc. So that when I’m without meds, I can fall back on skills I acquired and trained.
What I also do is hoard medication. Ask for a higher dose or more pills, than I actually need. That way I can miss an appointment and still have enough for the next month or so. I even hide pills in different places around my apartment.
Also in Germany, undiagnosed.
There is an ADHD clinic close to me - They sent me a bunch of forms to fill out. Not form-fillable PDFs. They expected me to go to a print shop, print it, fill it out, scan it, and email it back. About 8 months later I ended up just learning how to write texts into PDFs because I kept forgetting and postponing. Now to wait “up to 24 months” for the first appointment, what a joke.
Do it like I did: fail so hard at life that lose your job, lose Bürgergeld welfare, and are in danger of losing your apartment. Have a mental breakdown and go to a psychiatric hospital crisis center.
Do yourself a favor and buy a used brother laser printer. The toner lasts ages and they support universal PCL printer drivers. I bought one new 16 years ago and never bought new toner for it, only paper. It cost less than 100 € back then. Still prints.
Older Brother printers are amazing. I’ve had mine since 2007.
Healthcare shouldn’t be political currency. Healthcare care is an inherently political issue, as each government has to determine the best strategy for them, but like many things in the US politicians see it as just another talking point and something that actually impacts people. This leads to policy being made by people who aren’t knowledgeable about healthcare for people who have strong about healthcare but often aren’t impacted by these policies and don’t have a strong understanding of the topic.
While it would still be a horrible thing to have happen, I’m starting to think that having a bunch of LLMs run/control the government wouldn’t necessarily be worse than what we have now (at least in the US).
Yes.
Treatment for ADHD is meditation.
Sorry you got downvoted so much, because you’re not 100% wrong. Meditation can actually help with some ADHD symptoms, however
- Meditation can be especially difficult for those with ADHD, because it requires doing the exact thing their brain has trouble doing. If you are able to overcome that hurdle, it can be very helpful—exercising a part of your brain that is underdeveloped. But “just meditate” is useless advice for many people.
- This comes across as dismissive to the original post, which is about healthcare systems not just lacking accommodation, but full of extra challenges for the most vulnerable. There is much more to ADHD treatment than medication. For example, many people, especially those who went undiagnosed, have years of trauma to unravel, and therapy comes with all these same challenges.
I have ADHD. I was diagnosed 32 years ago. In all that time, nothing has helped me but meditation. Of course it’s difficult. That’s not an excuse to not help yourself and treat the symptoms instead of the disease. People are so quick to accept a diagnosis and believe there is something wrong with them that can’t be fixed and use that perspective as a basis to over medicate themselves. It’s completely unnecessary. Regular meditation physically restructures the brain and can repair the abnormalities that cause ADHD. I know this for a fact. I guarantee not a single person downvoting me has tried meditation in any serious capacity, or done any research on its effectiveness. Imagine if people actually put effort into helping themselves instead of doping themselves with amphetamines!
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Sorry, this is just scientifically untrue. Meditation can help improve symptoms by strengthening skills that are typically atrophied in ADHD brains, it doesn’t “physically restructure” your brain any more than learning does.
I’m glad it has worked for you, and meditation is certainly a safe and often valuable method for improving many aspects of mental health. However, framing it as some miracle cure is disingenuous.
Meditation has been shown time and again to increase grey matter in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, thicken cortical areas, enhance neuroplasticity and reduce the size of the amygdala. The major physical markers of ADHD happen to be reduced grey matter in the prefrontal cortex and low cortical thickness. Functionally it is also an overactive default mode network, which regular meditation has been shown to drastically decrease. This is all very well documented, but thanks for asserting the opposite.
So you’re partially right, what you say about meditation helping and restructuring the brain is true and it can help. However, it isn’t an end all be all cure for everyone.
When talking about ADHD, I usually make sure we agree on the definition. Here when I reference ADHD I’m not just talking about the symptoms (inattentiveness, hyperactivity, executive functioning, impuls control, etc), I also mean that these symptoms exist in a person in such a way that it makes their life significantly harder. So, things like struggling or being unable to hold down a job, maintain friendships, and/or live independently.
ADHD does present differently in different people (often broadly categorized into Predominantly Inattentive Type, Predominantly Hyperactive-Impulsive Type, and Combined Type) as well as affecting people with different intensities. This, to the best of my understanding, also means that different strategies for coping with ADHD have differing levels of effectiveness. While some may benefit immensely from meditation, others will need to make other lifestyle changes or will absolutely need medication to handle their symptoms. Usually a combination of different techniques are required to be able to effectively function with ADHD. What techniques work may change over time as well, as our bodies change.
The reason why stimulants or other medications prescribed so often is that they are consistently and broadly effective with helping people manage their ADHD symptoms. It’s best to treat meds as a starting point, something that can keep you going while you determine if non-medication base solutions work for you and start to implement them in your life (if they exist, for some they don’t). Unfortunately, many people don’t have access to proper therapy to get that far. They might be able to get a diagnosis and prescription, but don’t have the ability to continue to get the help they need in further exploring solutions.
While I’m glad meditation works for you, it is a wonderful tool, ADHD (and mental health in general) is complex and cannot be ‘fixed’ for everyone in a reliable, repeatable way.
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yeah and getting it is hell. either you go for the pharma version, and there are so many hoops to jump through that you basically can’t if you have ADHD, or you try to go with the street version, which is really hard to synthesize and you end up wasting a day on ego death if you dose too high.
Where do you buy this meditation? Is it medication without a c?
dunno; that’s always the hard part. tbh I usually just give up.
The poster said meditation (you sit there trying not to think), not medication (drugs)
equally true.
Shoutout to ADHDcentral. They tried to make the process as clear and accessible as possible. With automated reminders.
What is this? I searched this in Brave search and got like no relevant results.
I’m curious as well. This is the closest relevant result I got, sadly it is for The Netherlands.
You guys don’t have repeat prescriptions?
I just order mine on an app when I get a reminder and then pick it up from the chemist a few days later when I get a ping.
Your use of “chemist” makes me think you’re out of the US.
Most ADHD meds in the US are “controlled substances” and that means our doctors can only prescribe up to three months at a time. After three months we have to have a follow-up appointment, then they can prescribe three more months of meds.
Plus the federal government decided that too many people were taking medications like Adderall. So their “solution” was to instate a cap on how much Adderall manufacturers can make. Which means there’s now a national shortage of Adderall. And that shortage means folks with ADHD are frequently going without their meds entirely or are forced to call multiple pharmacies in the area to ask who has their meds in stock. (My health insurance through work requires me to use a mail-order pharmacy because it means cost savings for them. But that means I don’t have the luxury of shopping around different stores to see who has my meds in stock - at least, not to fill the prescription through insurance and get the lower price. So if the mail order place is out, then I’m screwed.)
Our healthcare system is so fucked.
I have to go in every year to get refills on my epi pens and my migraine meds. I have to have a doctor sign off on those and I don’t really know why. I am not on ADHD meds but I imagine that would be the same.
It’s every 6 months for controls.
Oh yeah… I should probably refill my epipens…
My old doctor used to require monthly check-ins to get my ADHD meds.
Usa person, i canget auto refills on meds never tried with adhd meds though. The ones that have auro refill have a final refill date and max refill number.
Like the person above said, I’ve only ever had them do that three months at a time, but it’s better than monthly, which is how I started.
I have difficulty believing that the DEA allows a 90 day supply of stimulants.
On December 19, 2007, a DEA regulation came into effect that allows a prescriber to issue multiple prescriptions authorizing an individual patient to receive a total of up to a 90-day supply of a Schedule II controlled substance.2 However, this is allowable only under the following conditions:
There are some restrictions, but it’s a thing. It looks like it can depend on state. In my case, I believe they did it every month, but I only had to visit the office once every three months, the two after that were just called in/you could fill out a website form if you had any issue. But that likely counted as “three prescriptions,” rather than “a single 90-day prescription,” to your point. The main thing for me was not having to get away from work and into a doctor’s office every single month only for her to say, “Alright! See you next month!” as she charged me more than the insurance allowed to fund her (literal) new Corvette parked out front.
My anxiety, depression, and executive dysfunction prevent me from talking to a therapist and getting a diagnosis. I am so sick of this…
You really don’t need a therapist. You just need a GP that’ll do the questionnaire.
CBD gummies have worked miracles for my depression and anxiety. Depending on where you live, maybe give it a try for a week or two and see what happens?
What dosage are you taking, when, and what type?
These guys work really well.
https://wyldcbd.com/products/raspberry-gummies
They have different flavors, and for me the peach ones work really well
This is the state of U.S. healthcare, homie just prescribed peach flavoring.
I know this is accurate because I also live in this hellhole.
It’s great, isn’t it? I also got laid off at the end of January, lost my health insurance immediately so I had to cancel my gallbladder removal for the next week because I could no longer afford it.
ThE pRiVaTe MaRkEt WiLl SoLvE tHe PrObLeM
Just hold your breath, it will trickle down any second
I started with a 300mg per bag of 20 (so each gummy would be 20mg each). I would take one a night for a week, every other week (I’d stay sober when with my kids). After a couple of 300, I moved up to 2000 (100mg/gummy).
What brand?
3CHI Gummies
The 2000 is called Pulse. I forget what the 300 was called.
As someone with unmedicated ADHD and a severe heart condition, I feel this rant deep, deep in my soul but more for my heart stuff.
You mean I have to call for follow ups every three months and also remember to fill my multiple medications every month or else I am sent on a death spiral? And you also mean to tell me that I can’t take any of the typical ADHD drugs because it might hurt my heart?
Win win.
