Posted by zeugma on October 17, 2003, at 18:38:28
In reply to Re: wellbutrin and strattera loolot, posted by MamaB on October 17, 2003, at 14:49:01
I too was diagnosed with ADD (back then, it was called Minimal Brain Dysfunction, which is certainly more evocative if less 'politically correct') before adult ADD was the widely-diagnosed condition it is now. It has only been in the past three or four months, since adding Strattera to my other meds, that I feel cognitively 'normalized.' I had tried stimulants over the years with an unacceptable side effect- drastic weight loss. I was discontinued on Ritalin and Cylert against my wishes, but on my doctors' orders, because i was already terribly underweight. Meanwhile i've had concurrent depression since childhood, as well as Nonverbal Learning Disorder, a still poorly-understood condition which can be quite incapacitating on its own.
Luckily, though, I had learned some things over the last decade and a half (I'm 35 btw): SSRI's exacerbate my depression, but I was hospitalized in the late 80's and they put me on a TCA which caused the depression to remit. If I had known then what I was to find out later, I never would have gone off the TCA even though I felt, as the script says, much better. TCA's went out of fashion and ignorant pdocs always had the latest and greatest SSRI to whip out of their cabinets (I'm thinking of all the samples they were eager to unload on me). Finally over a year ago I found an ADD specialist who was a little more informed about meds (doctors can be frightfully ignorant people!) and was willing to go along with my strongly-voiced wish to go back on a TCA. Well, here I am on a TCA and now on Strattera too and feeling 'normal' for the first time in my life.
You're skeptical of those who give advice here, but I think(just IMO, but a olot of the evidence is rather convincing) that many of the people who regularly post here are far more knowledgeable than their own pdocs. 'A little learning is a dangerous thing,' true, but it is far better to hang out here where huge quantities of info flow back and forth, than in the old days, where a dry reference text might list some side effects of the meds and little in the way of actual explanation of how they worked. And no doctor can know the inside of my head the way I can :)
poster:zeugma
thread:269769
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20031015/msgs/270356.html