Hi everyone,
I have adult adhd and have been through hell and back more than I care to mention. As I understand it, this forum is about harm reduction, which translates to education, discussion and eventually I guess we all hope a little wisdom and maybe even looking out for each other.
I have found some great tips on this thread and probably have something to contribute once I have read through it properly.
Celeph Pachino - thankyou. You have inspired me to stop work and register on these forums for the first time.
Your contribution is astounding. You essentially stole just under two weeks worth of someone's prescription medication, from your own work-place no less, then proceeded to eat them, sit on them, wash / smudge the effects away with smoke and ethanol, then find it remarkable that you didn't even feel the slightest bit shitty afterwards.
I don't envy your lifestyle, I actually feel sorry for you and your complete lack of understanding, empathy and compassion for your fellow human beings. With a bit of luck, you will notice when that karma comes back to you and provides the opportunity to learn, grow and move on.
This is a decent thread and I apologise for entering into things in such a bitchy manner.
The OP asks if anyone has trouble sticking to their prescribed dose, and the answer is yes, if you have ever been prescribed them, chances are you felt exhausted at some point what with your new found completely 'normal' ability to lead a productive life, and confused this with thinking that more of these meds would be the answer when actually it is a case of less = more with amphetamines and the more breaks you are able to take, the more you can rest your body, reset tolerance levels and maybe approach some exotic things like deep sleep and vitamin C which are otherwise going to potentially trigger some fairly brutal interactions.
For sure, if someone at work found my meds and decided that they needed / wanted them more than I did, and that it was my fault for not finding out / confronting said person about it in order to have them returned, I would find it pretty fucking difficult to stick to my prescribed dose.
You cannot just wander down the street and obtain more once the script has been handed in. You are completely fucked until your next due to return. If you want to risk self medication you must then also risk being way over charged for a bag of bullshit and cutters that some little punk freak in a clapped out, 14 colour mitsubishi will provide to you sometime during the next few minutes / weeks, no one knows for sure. As well as this great service, such free spirits seem to have no trouble connecting your contact details to the 'about to be busted' list of contacts in their latest super special 99 dollar fruit flavoured mobile tracking device.
Whether or not forcing someone with mental differences to take a break from their meds turns out to be a blessing in disguise, the potential for it to be an inconvenience is somewhat huge, let alone being outright dangerous, disruptive, dishonest, unhealthy for everyone involved, and even more d-words like disrespectful, dumbo, deceptive, disgraceful and a dog-act.
Asking a psych to increase dose in Vic is equal to asking to look at you as if you were crazy. And being there, doing that, they may be right. If they are actually not right and you feel that nothing less than 30mg a day will be sufficient, then you can and probably should stand up for your rights and simply (yeh right) go over their heads. There are fair-practice authorities / regulations and people whose job it is to investigate complaints of psych mistreatment of their patients, to whom they are under contract and moral / ethical obligation to provide adequate care for.
I found these things out the hard way. The psych is banking on the fact that their opinion (read: licence to practice) is of more value than your own, and if they are good at their job, maybe so. Refusing to listen to patients is lame, but as soon as you rock up going Oh wow, things are much better now, if only I could get more, ... etc. red flags go up and you will be brick-walled for trying to tell them how to do their job, on the surface at least, and if you dig a little deeper or are lucky enough to find one who will hear absolutely everything you have to say, they might reveal why the crazy-crazy situation and paranoia on their part... heavy heroin users, for the most part, fucked up many, many things and red tape went flying everywhere.
Too many psychs were too lax and i guess people abused / over-indulged in whatever they were given, OD'd and woke up in emergency being added to the stats which get used to determine funding, licences and so on for the health industry.
It has nothing to do with us, and yet everything because we are hit with the full effects of genuinely seeking assistance only to be accused of being a drug abuser and threatened with losing any meds in any form, let alone useful, effective, reasonably safe / affordable ones.
They are worried about losing their licences, and we cannot blame them for that. There are regulations which actually are intended to maintain safety in the community and it is a sad irony that it translates to further self-medication, incarceration, deterioration of health and well being, on and on.
If I never left Vic I never would have even been diagnosed. I never would have been able to begin to take my fucking life back from this blanket ghost that had remained invisible to me and yet abused by so called friends and family in manipulating and disheartening ways. I never would have learned to begin to recognise areas of life where vast improvements were to be found and made by working towards. Never would have realised that my closest friends were all suffering similar things and yet still in that pre-diagnoses phase of just not knowing and not wanting to be told something that re-writes everything you thought you knew about yourself, others, your social life, mental and emotional well-being and lack thereof.
This is not a trivial topic by any means. It's life and death for so many of us. Bring on 2021 and in the meantime, some real open, honest discussion about risks vs benefits and how we can just make it safely to the end of the day. I've lost count of the number of times this nearly hasn't happened.
