Because inattentive ADD has done real damage to my life, both personally and professionally. It very nearly destroyed my marriage.

I politely suggest that you check your anti-medication bias at the door. OP is describing a lifetime of feeling s/he is a failure and unable to achieve the goals he would otherwise set for themselves. This is classic ADD symptoms, and the only real therapy with lasting results is medication.

For ADD people such as myself, medication is life-altering in a positive way. I clearly divide my life before and after as different eras: before was a lifetime of failure measured against my own goals (not only external / work requirements), and after a still-ongoing period of self-empowerment and growth.

Yet people such as yourself would attempt to guilt trip and shame us from seeking the only thing which actually helps: modifying our brain chemistry. Why? What reason do you have for shutting down discussion of taking medicine to address a medical condition?

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boredemployee 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I did struggle my whole life with "attention". Like my attention span in meetings is awful. I record everything so I can listen to later. it's time to look for a doctor.

Question: does stimulants interfere in other areas of life in a bad way (like sexual life etc)?

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adastra22 2 days ago | parent [-]

Depends on the drug and dosage. AFAIK stimulants generally don't have severe or long-lasting impact on those areas.

Both Ritalin and Adderall (as well as variants like Vyvanse) are vasoconstrictors and therefore affect blood flow. This leads to some mild discomfort. "Adderall dick" is a temporary condition comparable to "pool shrinkage"; it doesn't affect everyone, depends on the dose, and neither impacts performance--it still responds to sexual stimulation.

Stimulant usage can mildly increase blood pressure, which over the very long term (years, decades) can lead to ED and other more serious issues. However that is part of why these medications require close supervision by the prescribing doctor, who will add other medications like lisinopril to counteract those effects, if observed.

In rare but reported cases it can lead to some weird effects, like dissociating orgasms from physical climax -- you can find lots of self-reports on Reddit about these sorts of things. None of these are permanent and go away when the drug leaves your system.

In the vast majority of patients, none of the above happens, and I'm not aware of a single thing that is permanent (other than the effects of high blood pressure over time if you let that go unwatched). This is unlike, for example, SSRIs which have have permanent effects on sexual well-being. I bring this up because some doctors prescribe SSRIs as a first-line, so they don't have to prescribe controlled substances. Don't let them do this to you -- antidepressants can have some insanely bad (and in some cases, permanent) side effects, drastically alter your personality, and are not considered the standard of care for ADHD.

	▲	boredemployee 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for the detailed reply! Really appreciate it. I take SSRI since 2019 because of generalized anxiety disorder, but I'm much better now, my life changed a lot (for the better) and want to stop to take it or change for something else, because I'm already in a low dose but delayed ejaculation is something that I hate, I never had problems with it and the drug takes it to another level. So I'll check what is a safe combination to perhaps threat both. My attention span really annoys me. ChatGPT told me about vortioxetine for attention disorder and anxiety, which I'll discuss with the doc. Thanks again!

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tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hold on, I'm not saying you should do anything differently than you and your doctor worked out. I have no idea what your situation. I'm reacting to a comment that looked at someone who feels their situation is going just fine and responded by suggesting medication.

	▲	adastra22 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I didn't read OP as "feel[ing] their situation is going just fine." That was certainly the tone he was projecting, but the actual content he discussed was a lot of coping strategies for what he sees as his own mental handicap. The purpose of my comment was just to point out, in case he wasn't aware, that it may in fact be a condition that can be medically treated. To make an absurd comparison, it's as if he wrote a whole blog post about his sailing hobby and how he deals with scurvy on long trips. Maybe there's a lot of innovative tricks he throws in there, along with lowering of expectations -- scheduling the rough legs of the journey to be right after leaving port, before the symptoms set in. The intention of my post was: "have you tried taking vitamin C?" Stimulants have this effect on ADD people. We don't feel the euphoric highs other people report, nor does it have much in the way of negative side effects. It's a pill I take once a day which gives me control over my life and my well-being. We celebrate neural-diversity and rightly so, but after living many decades of my life as a neuro-atypical person, it is wondrous to be able to just take a pill and be 'normal' for a day, where normal here just means "able to do what I want, when I want to; be aware and present in the moment; and live without regrets." Sorry for snapping at you earlier, but those of us that choose medication end up having to deal with a lot of this societal judgement crap. Judged by the doctors and pharmacists who treat us as criminals, judged by schools and teachers who think stimulants are overprescribed, and judged by generally everyone when the topic comes up. There's a stigma here and it is a serious issue, so I push back on it when I see it.
	▲	istjohn 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Why drug your way to a different thinking style? Would you talk this way about statins, PrEP, or ACE inhibitors?