Image not quite for ADHPeeps but I feel this sort of thing happens regularly for us as well.
I was put on bupropion for depression and, while it didn’t work perfectly, it worked far better than the other antidepressants I had been on. Then I found out that it’s frequently used off label to treat ADHD and I started to have some suspicions. Long story short, now I’m diagnosed and on a stimulant and it’s amazing.
I have some heart issues, so my doctor put me on bupropion to see if it would touch my ADHD symptoms. I don’t think that it has, but it has helped a bit with my depression.
I wish there was a stimulant out there that didn’t risk making my heart issues worse. I think getting my ADHD under control would also go a long way towards helping with my depression and anxiety. Unfortunately we’ve mostly been addressing the symptoms of the depression and anxiety and not the ADHD.
I’m a heavy tea drinker. When I got diagnosed with ADD at 40 I realized I was probably (lol) self-medicating with the copious amounts of tea.
Still better (and tastier) than meds IMHO. Of course don’t take my advice always, ALWAYS, talk to your doctor.
You should know that there is data that backs you up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875377/#sec5-nutrients-14-00739
And also on the self-medicated front: nicotine is effective too. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8741955/
What this makes me wonder is how much of the population is self-medicated in this way but doesn’t know it?
Yup didn’t mention cigarettes because I kicked the habit but nicotine also does wonders for ADD. LOL
Tea. Extremely strong tea, the kind russian convicts drink.
ADHD, self-medicating behaviour from childhood in the form of candy seeking. Impossible impulse to control and occurs when experiencing a dip in concentration/boredom. It helped me focus for very brief moments.
Ooooh man as a kid I didn’t really like stuff that was strongly sweet or sour. But as an adult sour candy were my thing to the point that I burnt out them even tasting sour. I’d eat a family size bag of sour Skittles on long drives to help me concentrate.
Only sour candy though.
Sour candy still has a lot of sugar in it. Plus, acid can make us feel awake. Works well against nausea too.
I think I got this from lemmy?
What if caffeine doesnt work on me?
I got 10 hours of sleep last night, drank a coffee at noon. Still crashed at 130 and had to take an afternoon nap like normal.
I believe it’s common for ADHD folks that caffeine doesn’t energize you, but it might help you concentrate better. Or it might not. I don’t know, really. I drink copious amounts of coffee and energy drinks and still have trouble concentrating.
I dont see how I can concentrate if im passed out in the middle of the day lol.
That’s fair
Reminds me of when people find out I do cocaine and Adderall.
“Oh Michael likes to get high”
No, Michael doesn’t have health insurance and has very severe adhd. I can’t live a normal life without stimulants and drug dealers are cheaper than doctors. welcome to America.
Cocaine bad for mental health. Even with ADHD cocaine is so cut and stepped on its not reliable enough to get anything done.
It falls into the “better than nothing” category for me. I’m aware it’s absolutely not a good idea.
I’m sorry your government failed you so badly. That’s a tough place to be in.
Thank you Mr poopybutthole
The “bad guys” are bridging the gap!
You nailed it. I fall into the insurance gap in my state. I make too much for free healthcare but not enough to qualify for discounts on healthcare. The Fed thinks I should be helped by my state, my state disagrees.
what state?
I’ll give you a hint with a fake headline…
“Man attempts to marry racoons but refuses to sign the racoons pre-nup”
What state is it?
Damn mate, that’s really rough. I did see recently how US companies are taking advantage of the made-up scarcity to scalp people with ADHD to the point where the black market is more affordable. I only you know what you’re doing vis-a-vis risks from tainted batches.
I do worry about getting a hot batch and dying but that’s just the state of America today. Women will be getting dangerous back ally abortions as well soon.
please test your pills! fentanyl test strips are cheap and widely available. you can also use reagent tests to confirm what is (and isnt) in them. DanceSafe is a great resource for this: https://dancesafe.org/
Why the combination? I have no idea about either.
It’s not a combination. I’d try to buy Adderall which is what a doctor would prescribe but there is an Adderall shortage because… Well because people sell their meds to drug dealers so the FDA clamped down.
So if Adderall isn’t available or too expensive I buy cocaine and use small amounts to combat my condition.
Similar but Pistachios. The mechanics of opening the shells and eating them allowed me to focus on the college professor’s material after an 9-10 hour work shift. If I showed up to class without pistachios or sunflower seeds I was nodding off in class.
When I was younger they gave me Ritalin, mostly to stop me from burning the building down. It worked, because I never burned the school down… can’t say the same for the neighbors shed… plus there was that incident with the bridge, luckily the fire department showed up quickly.
Extreme anxiety.
For the longest time, I couldn’t recruit enough concentration to get homework or big projects done until it was this huge looming threat. Frequently, that would involve an all-nighter since it was something due the next day. Other times, it meant cranking out last night’s math assignment in home room mere minutes before it was due. It turns out that adrenaline and other stress hormones are great at shoving all the ADHD noise out of the way, however temporarily.
Rockstar and pseudoephedrine Claritin with a fresh made breakfast burrito. Discovered I could focus easily for hours as the stimulants with a full stomach of food kept me from being overstimulated. Ironically cost me a lot more than Ritalin does as I didn’t have the time or money to pursue a diagnosis at that time.
Recently got diagnosed with asthma and just have an albuterol inhaler till I can see a specialist in 4 plus months, haven’t been able to get an ADHD test despite my doctors referral, just so you have a preface for my story here.
On days I work toward my goals I generally start with a 16 oz doubled tea, gives me stimulants which I can’t get at the moment and I generally am able to focus on my tasks for 2 hour stents or so. I have some days though that despite getting rest and having a dose of caffeine I get real low energy around my first hour. Recently, during one of these moments I was trying to take a break and realized my breathing was quite shallow and I was somewhat short of breath, so I used my inhaler and I had a rush of energy and was able to knock out all my tasks with energy to spare. Turns out most of my low energy days have been actually about my low blood oxygen and the effects of having undiagnosed asthma. This has happened to me several times now and it blows me away each time. I think to myself “So this is how normal people breath and get so much done.”
Dang a pug with ADHD. I’m glad you have it somewhat sorted, though.
For my own research purpose, would you be able to test your oxygen levels with those check oxygen meters that we get or may be one of those inbuilt Oxygen meters in smart watches?
I’m too poor to own a smart watch, maybe an idea for when I can.
Edit: Also they haven’t gave me an oxygen meter. Perhaps that is something the specialist does but not doctor in my state?
You could get one of the fingertip sensors, they’re not terribly expensive.
Nicotine. I started smoking at 16. Vaping now but nicotine and caffeine are carrying me through my unmedicated life
I would hazard that’s less unmedicated and more self medicated.
You’re not wrong haha. Can’t wait to be able to afford proper medicine
looks awkwardly at the next administration
All I need is one prescription bottle with my name on it and then it’s all onions from there
Holy shit! This post gave me an epiphany.
I was a cartoonist for the student newspaper, and drawing a funny comic strip every day was grueling. But I did better when I drank a Coca Cola before I started to brainstorm. Later, guess what - diagnosed ADHD.
Anyway, I probably took 2-3 hours on each comic, and was paid $5 per strip. And spent some of that on soda. So, it was a labor of love and foolishness. Also, I was semi-famous on campus for edgy cartoons that were occasionally funny, most of which I am embarrassed about in middle age.
My dad still swears it was the red bull and snickers and not the medical …
Wild that someone would think the Red Bull and Snickers are doing it directly without going through the some-ingredients-in-these-products-are-affecting-your-body route.
When I start having a feeling of getting a cold I drink Bayer’s Aspirin Plus C. It’s literally just aspirin and vitamin C but I swear it works. Not drinking aspirin and vitamin C but only this overpriced combination. When it is dissolved in water, grossly enough. Nothing else works. If I don’t drink it, I get a cold.
I literally worked in pharmaceutical science and I know this is complete bullshit borderlining homeopathy but I still swear by it. I wrote a whole academic work on vitamin C supplementation having no effect on getting a cold. And I still do it 😭
placebo is one hell of a uh not drug!
i noticed that sometimes when i have something important coming up, and i start feeling ill, i can just, force myself to stop? Literally tell myself “nuhuh, we’re not getting ill right now, that’s not the time” and it works? well not always, but more than it should
That might actually be cortisol released by a stress response. Do you tend to get sick a couple of days later when “there’s time”?
sometimes! other times it goes away entirely. I vividly remember the first time it happened, it was the first day of vacation at my great grandmother’s place. i started feeling ill but got so mad at that fact i woke up the next day feeling healthy again, and got to enjoy my vacation fully :)
Nice! That’s a great sign of how our mind can control our body. Something that we biomedics sometimes struggle with, in our eternal search for pathways.
I often had this when I had to study for exams. I was so stressed that I didn’t allow myself to get sick, and once the last exam was done, the stress level fell and I got so sick.
I learned about Linus Pauling’s ideas on Vitamin C supplementation. Pretty interesting stuff, especially wrt heart disease. I’m paraphrasing but if I remember correctly he theorized that our appendix used to produce vitamin C and that it somehow mutated away from that, and the lack of the vital nutrient causes heart disease problems with humans and all the great apes. Apparently we all get heart disease like cats have bad kidneys. He thought huge doses of vitamin C were the answer.
Yes, he is usually (and anecdotally) used in every introduction to works that cover vitamins and supplementation 😅 but unfortunately his ideas weren’t really backed by science. If you eat more vitamin c than you can absorb, you just pee it out. We actually did that in university (control group, breakfast group, breakfast + 1g of vitamin c group, testing the pee and I think capillary blood). Now, I think there are some findings with intravenous vitamin c acting like an oxidizing agent and killing cancer (?) cells, but macrodosing orally just doesn’t give you any effect.
Also, fun fact, your RDA can be met by eating one frozen pizza because vitamin c is used as a food additive everywhere.
Chewing gum almost every waking moment of the day. People used to assume I was trying to quit smoking, I would joke that I was actually trying to build my way up to starting.
I used to love chewing gum until a dentist scared me away from it. As a result, my undiagnosed grinding destroyed most of my teeth…
I am thankful that my dentist talked me into switching to a sugar-free brand years ago. Probably saved me a couple teeth so far.
suprised nobody said smoking weed, i smoke like 10 times a day minimum
That sounds a bit concerning, ngl >_<
