I'm a 40 years old single male with history of anxiety disorder in my family. Both my siblings experience symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks. We all have been taking Xanax for many years. The three of us also have struggled with ADD as well, but went untreated for most of our lives. In February 2012 I was told by a friend who has a hectic corporate job that his ADD was being treated with Adderall and according to him, his life had improved as well as his performance at work. I asked my doctor for the prescription and was given a regiment of 2.5 mg a day in June. Not satisfied with the results, by August 2012 I had my dosage increased to 10 mg of Adderall twice a day. My performance at work skyrocketed. The most noticeable side effect was inability to fall asleep, which was compensated with 10 to 20 mg of Zolpidem. It was not uncommon for me to sleep much less than 6 hours a day. Sometimes less. I was consuming some marijuana, often on a daily basis at night. Around that time, signs of paranoia and aggressive behavior were becoming very common, specially towards close friends.
By December 2012 I was taking 30 mg of Adderall twice a day. More often than not, 90 mg a day. My days typically started with 30 mg of Adderall washed down with a 5 hours energy shot, which kept me going until after lunch, when I would take another 30 mg pill with another 5 hour energy shot. The third pill would often come after dinner, specially if I had work to do. I had friends who often came to visit late at night.Sometimes I snort it. That was leaving me with very little sleep. Every time I felt needed, I took 20 mg of Zolpidem at night, which made me very emotional. I used to cry a lot in bed. Often I would go out late at night and walk around my neighborhood crying for no reason. In a couple of occasions I recall mixing Zolpidem and alcohol by mistake. Once a blacked out completely at night, waking up on my bed without any recollection of what have happened. In one occasion I woke up in a hospital.
By the end of January 2013 my behavior was becoming highly aggressive and chronic paranoia was settling in. I was hyper focusing in work and neglecting other aspects of my life. I became highly short tempered and often would lose my cool with close friends and strangers. I developed some road rage as well and in one instance I was escorted out of Best Buy for threatening a technician who did not fix my computer as fast as I needed. Who does that? I have never been known as an aggressive person. I was never known as a person who did such things, but I had changed and realizing how severe this behavior was often gave me crippling guilt and panic attacks. Combined with Zolpidem at night, I reached a point that I was aggressive all day and regretful at night. Often crying myself to sleep. I thought my car was being taking for joy rides by friends and strangers and obsessed about being taken advantage of. It was real in my head. My life turned into a living hell. I stop paying attention to my finances as well. By the end of February 2014 I had lost 35 lbs without visiting the gym once or dieting properly. I credited my weight loss to a diet program but in reality the food from the diet program was not being used properly. Often I binged on it after smoking pot. I lost that tremendous amount of weight that fast because of the high intake of Adderall.
The year of 2014 was pretty much a blur of ups and downs to me. I was showing all the classic signs of full blown drug abuse. My friends were very concerned about my state of mind. I was pushing friends and family away, often with absurd paranoid filled outbursts of anger or highly emotional interaction. Like with many addicts, people started to distance themselves from me. Only family and close friends were around, but even so my ability to socialize was becoming weaker. Less and less I felt like living my home. Also, like most addicts, I managed to keep the true extent of my use a secret. I often lied and told friends and family that I was no longer taking any pills, but I was secretly on a firm 90 mg a day intake with Adderall, 20, sometimes 30 mg of Zolpidem and lots of Xanax on a daily basis. Sometimes I would take breaks of a week or so. That was when suicidal thoughts started to flood my mind. One week in June 2014 was specially brutal. I did not have enough Zolpidem to put me to sleep. I was running out too early in the month and could not get the prescription refilled soon enough. My head was clouded and I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed. My spending to cover the amount of Adderall I needed to keep it going was out of control. I always had a stable life, financially speaking, but I was diving deeply into credit, maximizing credit cards and spending money that otherwise would go to my 401K. Money was becoming a severe problem. I made a plan to hang myself and went half way through it. The idea was to use the rope I had put on the roof of my building and jump from there to eliminate any chances of surviving. I installed the rope of Wednesday, 06/13/2014. I remember the date because the plan was to get it done on Saturday. Instead, I bought a ticket to fly to Brazil the day before and left without advising anyone at work or most of my friends. On the following day I arrived at my hometown. I was running out of Adderall, which was the begging of the end for me.
I spent nearly a month in Brazil. During that month, I was with family, eating well, sleeping well and running every day. I was drinking about a gallon of water a day as well. That made me feel way better. When I came back to the US, I started to do some research and was amazed to read online stories very similar to my own struggles with Adderall. I can't explain how, but somehow by July I was back on it even though I promised myself I was going to quit. Once again by mid August in 2014 I was already back on the pill, 60 mg a day + another 30 mg at night. It did not take very long for my mind started to go again. I was paranoid and restless, unable to perform at work and very agitated. The financial loss was pilling up and my spending spiraled out of control. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, taking 90 mg of Adderall, about 1 to 3 mg of Xanax, smoking about 60 dollars of pot every other day and taking a minimum of 20 mg of Zolpidem almost every night. Emotionally I was a train wreck. Aggressive and paranoid by day, emotional and fearful by night. By then I had alienated most of my friends, which sent me into a guilty trip that threw me into chronic depression. Around that time, my mother was diagnosed with breast Cancer. Being me the son who helps her financially, I started to panic as I did not have any money left. The suicidal thoughts were constant at that point. I was so very good hiding it! People who did not know me very well and even a few very close friends did not quite realized the real extension of the damage I was doing to myself.
That's when an incident happened with a dear friend of mine. At the pick of my paranoid anger and lack of self-control, 40K in debt, family in the need of assistance and on a severe drug binge I lost it with him one night and said terrible things. To him it was straw that broke the camel's back. After experiencing my drug filled behavior for a long time without quite realizing why I had become that person, he finally had it and, like many people do when dealing with a person with a drug problem, distanced himself for good. I was on Zolpidem at the time of the final incident, therefore I recall about half of what I did, but reviewing some text messages on the following day I was horrified by the person I had become. That's when I finally made the decision to seek help. I went to Brazil and cheked in on a outpatient rehab program for 2 weeks, returned to the US and signed up for substance abuse program with my healthcare provider. I've been doing group and individual therapy now. I quit smoking cigarettes and have been clean from Adderall and Zolpidem since 08/14/15. I don't have any urges to take pills at all. Considering some horror stories I've been reading online about this medication, I consider myself to be very lucky. Even the links of Adderall and PTSD make a lot of sense to me. Episodes of high stress level in my life throughout this struggle took a toll way worse than I know myself to allow. I do smoke weed at occasion, but nothing more than a joint or two a month. I was never into alcohol. This semester I had 2 glasses of wine and a rum and coke before dinner on my birthday. Nothing else. I since have find out that I failed to cash about 15 K worth of checks my company sent to me in three years. A glitch on the payroll system that made the payroll company send me checks instead direct deposit for a portion of my salary. I never bothered to look. I've been catching up with payments and will soon be debt free. I plan on buying a house next year. Mom went through a mastectomy and is doing well. Life is going back to normal. I lost some friends in the process and I have to leave with it.
Be aware of Adderall. Make sure you work closely with your doctor as the abuse of the medication can go unnoticed and little by little you can find yourself in a terrible mess. It is way too easy to get a prescription and when you least expect, you are hooked. The most amazing thing I have learned is how real all those paranoid thoughts and distorted reality were. They are incredibly convincing and you start to develop patterns of thinking that lead you to something I can only describe as a parallel reality. Things that now make no sense whatsoever to me, like someone stealing my car for the night was so vivid in my head to a degree that I was looking on video footage of the parking lot to make sure nobody was in fact doing it while I was sleeping. You really need to trust your friends and family and follow the advice to look for professional help. It most likely saved my life.
having a bit of a rough patch at work was all it took for me to escalate. I will not let this become a habit.
