Is my ADHD medication working?

Post date: 2021-04-13 06:13:40

I recently started taking 5mg Adderall for ADHD but I can't tell if it's working? I would ask the nurse practitioner who prescribed it but I didn't get the sense that she has ADHD so I would not expect her to actually understand what I was talking about in terms of how I feel inside my head.

The way that this seems to feel in my head is that some people are riding a lovely, friendly horse in their head and other people are riding a zebra. If there's a watering hole up ahead or some delicious grass then me and my zebra are going there together, but if it's something my zebra doesn't want then it takes some force on my part to convince the zebra that that's what we should do, and I am not always as successful in that as I would like. I have thought about taking medication for a long time but finally it was hearing that a cousin of mine is also taking medication finally got me off my butt to see one of those online prescribers.

Comparing how I feel now with the medication to how I felt before, it seems to make the symptoms more intense? One of the most noticeable and easy to describe symptoms I'm experiencing is that for the last couple of weeks, I have my personal computer next to me at my work desk. While I'm working on my own work outside of meetings I do OK because my work interests me, but during meetings my brain is greedy for stimulation and I feel uncomfortable & almost in psychic pain without having twitter, metafilter & fb going on the side. This interferes with my work when sometimes I zone out so far that I didn't hear something important that was said.

I thought that the medication would help with this and make it easier to focus, but it seems to make my brain more frantic in its urges and even harder to get under control. I'm cycling between websites during meetings in a way that would look truly problematic to an outside observer.

I think this is even more important in the context of ADHD because what I have read makes it sound like in some ways the medication is a test of whether you have it or not and if the medicine doesn't work then you might not have it. Is it that the medication is new and me and my zebra have to get accustomed to a new normal? Or is it that maybe this medication isn't right for me and we should try something else? What do you think?

Re: what I wrote above the fold about my prescriber not being ADHD, in the time that I've been trying to ask health professionals for help with what's going on in my head, it's my experience that if they don't know from lived experience what I'm talking about, they classify it in their head as the same as someone describing their sprained wrist (just put a splint on it, you're fine), and that mindset never results in something helpful for me. If anyone has recommendations for someone who can actually help me, I am all ears.

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