04-09-2016, 12:21 PM
Well said, Harley! I am of the evil baby boomer generation (you know, the generation that NYT opinion writers blame for all US domestic fiscal shortfalls - I hope I'm able to read the NYT from heaven after I pass, can't wait to see who they blame when we're all gone), so ADD / ADHD didn't exist as diagnoses for us. As children we were simply labeled as hyperactive, none too smart, and prone to bad behavior, which just translated into "Sir, Ma'am, you need to whip the tar out of that boy more than you're doing", which encouragement my Daddy just shrugged and took to heart - So in addition the the whippings I was already getting (This was Central Texas in the 60's and 70's - whipping one's children was standard parental behavior, and my Daddy didn't want to be long about it, so he'd grab the first thing that caught his eye when it came whipping time; a hoe, a rake, or a shovel if he wanted to get it done before going in the house, or once in the house, a rolling pin, a cutting board, or a wooden coat hanger, and go upside my head with it two or three times, then be off about his business).
I never even heard of ADHD until my psychiatrist, who has been treating me for GAD for 11 years or so now gave me a standardized test after I described the problems I was having at work...I was a programmer then, and my job was coding device drivers for digitizers, scanners, printers, and the old Gould image processing hardware boxes, so I was writing kernel level code for various flavors of BSD and system V UNIX workstations produced by HP / Apollo, Tektronix, MIPS, DE, and Sun - "C" and the assembler language for either the Motorola 88K chipset or the RISC chipset, and I found it enormously difficult to concentrate on finishing one code module at a time - Often, by the end of the day I'd have partially completed 3-5 modules and written myself a list of where to pick up with each of them the following day.
As you might imagine, I "passed" the standardized ADHD test with flying colors, and was first prescribed Dexedrine, which made me into a whirling dervish of productivity, but also raised my blood pressure and body temperature, and left me a quivering mess by the end of the day. I was then switched to Adderall (20mg 2x per day), which had the same effect. When my Doc switched me to Ritalin it was like a whole new world opened up, not only can I now focus on the wide array of multitasking efforts required to manage projects and programs, but I have no side effects at all.
Just goes to show yet again that people react to medications in quite different ways, that's why there are so many variants of them for treating the same condition.
Again, great post Harley - adds the context mine left out. A+, my friend.
I never even heard of ADHD until my psychiatrist, who has been treating me for GAD for 11 years or so now gave me a standardized test after I described the problems I was having at work...I was a programmer then, and my job was coding device drivers for digitizers, scanners, printers, and the old Gould image processing hardware boxes, so I was writing kernel level code for various flavors of BSD and system V UNIX workstations produced by HP / Apollo, Tektronix, MIPS, DE, and Sun - "C" and the assembler language for either the Motorola 88K chipset or the RISC chipset, and I found it enormously difficult to concentrate on finishing one code module at a time - Often, by the end of the day I'd have partially completed 3-5 modules and written myself a list of where to pick up with each of them the following day.
As you might imagine, I "passed" the standardized ADHD test with flying colors, and was first prescribed Dexedrine, which made me into a whirling dervish of productivity, but also raised my blood pressure and body temperature, and left me a quivering mess by the end of the day. I was then switched to Adderall (20mg 2x per day), which had the same effect. When my Doc switched me to Ritalin it was like a whole new world opened up, not only can I now focus on the wide array of multitasking efforts required to manage projects and programs, but I have no side effects at all.
Just goes to show yet again that people react to medications in quite different ways, that's why there are so many variants of them for treating the same condition.
Again, great post Harley - adds the context mine left out. A+, my friend.