down.fascination.street

This makes me very sad because sometimes it is hard to talk about diagnosis and about medication, and particularly medication that isn't working, and i know for too many parents there is a sense that their child's diagnosis is something that shouldn't be openly discussed, or that is some embarrassment on the record of their parenting. A beloved person of my life just went in for diagnoses recently and both her and her mum were pretty upset by the observational feedback she received and by hearing her described as disabled. I think it is a big adjustment on her mums part, like your kid coming out or something, its trying to fit a new facet in to the image you have of them. I take ritalin 3 x daily and last year i briefly moved on to concerta and it was absolutely bloody horrible. I am also diagnosed with ADHD, predominantly inattentive, i am also very sound sensitive and i was wearing noise cancelling headphones in public spaces for pretty much the whole time i was on concerta. i felt way more agoraphobic and precarious - on one occasion i had a massive headrush in a lecture where i became totally sensory overwhelmed and had to sit in a stairwell for like 30 mins until i could see again. Also i have really vivid dreams and they were so much worse on concerta that id wake up feeling like i hadnt slept... I'm much happier back on ritalin. I know some people hate going up and down three times a day but i quite like the tide of it and the certainty of knowing where i am in each cycle. For me a huge problem is about overstimulation and feeling bombarded. It makes sense that putting music on is different from the messy, busy noises of other people in a space because a) that is something that you can control, and b) a piece of music follows an established structure that is reassuring if you know it, if i'm in a hectic space i would mainly just listen to a few songs i know very well... kind of like chanting. But it is frustrating all of those skeptical comebacks of 'well if you cant concentrate when its busy, how comes you  do this... or like that...' Its much like my all time bugbear of 'you dont look like you have adhd' (which is what? im not a texan 7 year old...?) and the complete lack of common understanding around hyperfocus. Show me an ADDer and i will show you a person who has at some point been told that they are just pretending not to be lazy because 'they did x project that interested them perfectly well...' Do people accuse Aspies of putting it on because they are more engaged toward conversing around a subject of particular interest than in cocktail party chit chat? That is a serious question. For real. I am concerned that people think that we've gone to all this trouble with ed psychs, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, therapists and pharmacists, all because we wanted to get special attention. Seriously. It would have been much easier to post a minge pic on twitter. As it happens i am delighted by my own slow wave, space cadet, introverted thought world... all the diagnostic fraff is around the fact that i have to live in the big fast populated hyper productive world of interactive multimedia, electronic form filling bureaucracy and semiocapitalism. And this is a civilisation that i am not particularly streamlined or armoured for. Anyway. I am still sad now that somebody i dont know, on the inter web, who makes thought patterns maybe a bit similarly to how i do, has to take a medication that is making them feel worse all the way until autumn just because talking about this kind of thing makes people feel uncomfortable or ashamed.