ADHD & Personality Change; is it worth it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Instead of experimenting with drugs, how about experimenting with diet and lifestyle changes. Cut the processed crap out of their diet, get them outside and limit electronics. Improvement will happen, you need and should make the effort to change the direction of your child’s life now. Either you teach them to be dependent on drugs for the rest of their lives or not. Your choice.

There are only a handful of kids like this, whose environment is affecting their attention more than their brain. I do think my sisters kids may be in this boat (no enforced bedtime, exhausted kids constant iPad, true crap diet), but the majority is an actual brain deficiency

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To OP- there are a few different nonstimulants. My kid was sad and worse behaved on guanificine. They are doing fine on a different medication now. I’d at least ask for a med check with your doctor if it’s been more than a while. There might be something else that is a better fit.

Op here - thank you! Same meds. Will try for new

OP, as a prescriber, my experience is that I see many children who become "sluggish," for lack of a better word, on guanfacine. They put on weight, don't have the energy for activities, and can get sad and withdrawn. It's a blood pressure medicine, and I see more side effects with this than with the stimulants.

For some children, it works great. After seeing a lot of children try it, I am not surprised when I see the changes you describe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If teachers are annoyed by your kids's bounciness and talkativeness, then it's a problem at school. He's disruptive and maybe disrespectful. You think your kid is cute and his quirks are adorable, but to a teacher who is managing a classroom of 30 kids, disruptions are so incredibly difficult.

I would keep trying to find the right meds, but don't give up altogether

I am a tutor who works one on one with my ADHD students. Some are very impulsive and interrupt verbally frequently. This is fine in a one on one environment in the sense that I can manage it, it doesn’t create negative feedback, BUT it is actually very bad for the student because if is disrupting their train of thought, their ability to follow, repeat and execute multi step processes and explanations and makes it harder for them to store information. And, everything takes more time with these detours.

On the surface, to the parents, tutoring seems to “solve the problem”, but TBH for a substantial portion of my students the need for my services would be diminished if they were on a good medication. Medication helps 80% of people with ADHD.

Actually there is little evidence that stimulants produce long-term academic aims. They do reduce distruptive behavior.

My kid was diagnosed later in schooling and went from taking little to no notes (if he even had a notebook or pencil with him in class) to having normal notes. Looking back at past notebooks, he realized that he clearly was missing 80% of what was happening in the room academically. Peer notebooks were not so empty.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Instead of experimenting with drugs, how about experimenting with diet and lifestyle changes. Cut the processed crap out of their diet, get them outside and limit electronics. Improvement will happen, you need and should make the effort to change the direction of your child’s life now. Either you teach them to be dependent on drugs for the rest of their lives or not. Your choice.

What makes you think these kids are fitting the ugly mold you just created? Lordy, you are awful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I see that most adhd kid at school come across 3 below big challenges. What are the most important factor (among 3 below) for parents to decide their elementary school kids to take adhd med? Kids

- academic grade
- school behavior/disruption
- social friendship/self esteem

To me, my child easily gets As, school behavior is okay, and he has some random casual friends. Adhd affects him the most at school is his social friendship, but self esteem is okay because he is excel at academic.He has asd, so I can't know if adhd med can help with social friendship with peers. He makes a lot of casual friends at camps/school, but he just does not know how to keep friendship. I think this problem is coming a lot more from asd than adhd.

PP, you see your child the most and know him the best, so I would first follow your instinct - if you think the friendship piece is due to the ASD, try some ASD supports - does he have a therapist that specializes in ASD and can help explain, analyze and practice the friendship issues? some Michelle Garcia Winner’s “Social Thinking” work is applicable to both ASD and ADHD kids. Google for more about that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To OP- there are a few different nonstimulants. My kid was sad and worse behaved on guanificine. They are doing fine on a different medication now. I’d at least ask for a med check with your doctor if it’s been more than a while. There might be something else that is a better fit.

Op here - thank you! Same meds. Will try for new

OP, as a prescriber, my experience is that I see many children who become "sluggish," for lack of a better word, on guanfacine. They put on weight, don't have the energy for activities, and can get sad and withdrawn. It's a blood pressure medicine, and I see more side effects with this than with the stimulants.

For some children, it works great. After seeing a lot of children try it, I am not surprised when I see the changes you describe.

For DS, and the three buckets someone else wrote, his problems since infancy have always been behavioral/disruption. In that case, the non-stims have been lifesavers, because we want him to dial the F down and get a "sluggish" like other kids, instead of running around like a maniac, dangerous to himself and others. We have far worse side effects on stimulants. Before we started the non-stimulants, in order to have him on a high enough stimulant dose that he could go through a typical school day without incident, the needed dose left him like a walking zombie. It sucked.