People with ADHD are screwed? Are not you satisfied with the stimulants that was prescribed to you? What about us with Schizotypal Personality Disorders that is for life? Include the depression on top of that...
I don't think that's entirely fair - being prescribed stimulants isn't exactly a happy fun-party, and symptoms of ADHD are pretty likely to persist for life (though there are ways of dealing with them). It's pretty common to experience depression in conjunction with ADHD, so let's not play a game of "who's got the worst mental illness", yeah? Everybody has their own struggles.
Forgive me, but this post is probably going to come down pretty hard in regards to the effects of ketamine on someone with obsessive behaviours, depression and attention deficit. It also got a lot longer than I expected! But, I'm pretty passionate about the fact that ket is just not going to solve anyone with OCD or ADHD's problems, cause it certainly didn't solve mine. It's gonna sound like an anti-drug poster, but don't get me wrong - I love ket. I love it so much that I hate it. The addictive effect it had far outweighed any benefit - it's so addictive, and toxic, that it's no wonder it's not prescribed. SSRIs and the like don't usually work too well either, and they're pretty awful, but at least they're not this kind of destructive. Not in my experience. They make you feel shitty, sure, but they've not had the kind of effect on me that I'm going to talk about now.
In my case ket certainly alleviated my symptoms for a while, but always at great cost. It certainly didn't work for an extended period of time, beyond the first couple of times using it. It was a short-term solution to a long-term problem, and then shit got real. I didn't jump right in at doing half gram lines, I started by doing it once, I felt great for a while. Then really small amounts on a daily basis. Then all the time, because it made everything go away.
I didn't feel so scared of things, of people - I also didn't give two fucks about anything. The only reason, I believe, that it alleviated the symptoms is because I was psychologically (and physically) completely incapable of indulging in the crazy behaviour I normally would. Whenever I had it, everything was fine in my head, I was quite content to let my life fall completely to pieces, which ordinarily would've chilled me to the bone. There's scientific proof that it alleviates depression, yeah, but the risks just far outweigh the benefit.
I became entirely happy to just live a shitty life, taking a lot of a shitty drug - but hey! At least I could walk out of the door without checking for the millionth time whether I'd locked it, fuck it, I hardly ever remembered to lock it at all - presumably that's why people robbed my shit all the time! I didn't give a shit about what people thought of me any more, I didn't give a shit about how perfect my grades were any more, I didn't feel a deep-rooted need to satisfy anyone else, and I didn't obsess about my lovers any more - on the contrary, I didn't care about them at all. I didn't care about anyone. I was happy, because I did nothing but satisfy my mind's need to just stop thinking about the real world and how dangerous and scary it is. I also lived a crappy life, in a crappy room, with crappy people, with no money and no possessions. The idea of being capable of having a sex life was laughable.
What I'm talking about is extreme, so I'll quit with the scare stories. I just wanna stress to you that though ket works for a bit, it's easy to let it get really bad really fast. Shockingly fast. My life went from comparatively, pretty good, though it was difficult, to really shockingly shit in a matter of months. Just for some relief, to stop me acting so crazy all the time. Really, though, I was just crazy in a different way, I was just destroying myself instead.
Now that I don't take ket any more, dealing with things is certainly a lot harder than it was before I started taking it. I'm doing all that obsessive stuff all over again tenfold. I'm not exactly sane to say the least. I take to relationships like a duck to hot tar. I'm more depressed than before I started taking it. My ability to focus (without my current medication) is quite a lot worse than before I started taking it. My memory and general cognitive function is perma-fucked. Like engineercchad said, it renders your brain a quivering mass of gray mush in the end.
But now that I'm off it, it's actually possible to exist. Like a human being. So I check my pockets every 30 seconds to make sure nobody's stolen my stuff. Okay, everything I ever do has to be 100% perfect or I will freak the fuck out. So I can't listen to someone without repeatedly yanking myself back, trying to remember what it was they said. However, I have a house now. I have possessions. I care about shit. I produce some good work that I am really proud of (takes me a long time to get shit done, but it gets done). I actually get up in the morning for reasons other than to go and get drugs. Sometimes, it's not so bad that your mind goes 1000 miles a minute, and that everything has to be just-so. It's exhausting and time-consuming and miserable sometimes, you get burnt out pretty easily, but at least it's a life man. It's hard, yeah, it's really hard. But that's all the more reason to do it, isn't it? The escape that ket provides, even in low doses, just isn't a scratch on succeeding in real life. This is coming from someone that still craves it every day. I loved it more than real life, cause in k-land I could be whoever or whatever I wanted to be, I was a tiny speck in the universe. But unfortunately, real life is what we've got to make the best of. Do yourself a favour, and don't use ket as a crutch. Regardless of how infrequently you do it now. In my experience, the only people who are frustrated that it isn't routinely prescribed are precisely the kinds of people that would be more addicted to it if it was (myself included, I used to feel the same way as you).
So far, all that has really been effective to alleviate attention-deficit somewhat has been Concerta XL. It doesn't have any recreational benefit for me, which is great. Stimulants never really did, and I'm glad for that. If I'd have had the same love for stimulants as I did for Ketamine, or as I did for opiates (that's a whole other story, but you can imagine why it gave me the same sort of relief) my life would be a lot worse all over again. Like others have recommended, maybe try nootropics. They're cheaper than stimulant drugs, and from what I hear pretty effective. I've been considering them myself. Therapy sucks, I'll agree with you on that one, and it doesn't really help me deal with ADHD. But talk to people around here, there are plenty of ways to make things easier for yourself. I'm just starting my journey because I was disconnected from life for a long time, in many different ways. But now I wanna embrace it, make up for lost time.
We're not all screwed. We're just a little bit different.
