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tsk Posts: 34
Member
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HI Dreamy, My only "expertise" on Adderall comes from a mother's experience so take my comments as such. Adderall, as I am sure you know, is a stimulant given to people who are hyper, have poor concentration or both. These people react opposite to the stimulant and it causes them to calm and then are able to focus. That being said perhaps your son was started on too strong of a dose to start because he is becoming too emotionally depressed and thus the crying bouts. Everyone responds so different the lowest dose possible is always recommended to start. The mood swings were very noticable in my son. The teacher's begged for us to put him on the med and it helped his behavior but then when he would come off the med in the evening, when I had to deal with him and homework, he was terrible. It made our lives a living hell because the only time we had to spend together was spent doing homework that would now take hours and hours to complete and leave me "hating" this child. Everyday would end up with the same issues. (I am not recommending this but this is what I did) I decided I didn't want my son on something that was going to alter his personality so full scale to sweet and innocent to an extremely angry, uncontrollable person, it just couldn't be healthy. I questioned whether it was just me not handling the situation right, maybe I was too high stung myself and we just weren't clicking by the end of the day. So I took some of the Adderall to see how I would feel emotionally because I didn't feel this young of a child could tell the pediatrician if the dose was right and he would of course question me about behavior. Well I felt good during the day but at night when the med would wear off I became very angry over the slightest stress, so angry I felt like I could hurt my child who was also now on the other end of the emotion scale. I tried it over a week's time and it was a definite issue because this was definitely my normal reaction. I thought, how could I have really understood how my little child was feeling if I had not done this. Anyway I told the doctor I noticed my son was rebounding at night and was much worse than he had been before the Adderall and he started him on a small dose of Wellbutrin also because it had a 24-30 hr sustain life and it helped dramatically with the rebounding, his temperment was much more even scaled. Also Concerta (I think that is the name sorry) is not an amphetamine and isn't suppose to have the rebound effect of Adderall. It is a very hard decision what to do for them at this young age and I feel for you having to go through this. |
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He's always had behavioral issues but these are totally different. He is extremely emotional all day and has moments of sporadic crying for no reason. Big sobbing meltdowns. He also has no appetite and I think he's lost weight. It has also been impossible to get him to sleep at night and he stays up till 2 AM most of the time, and is back up at 5:30 to get ready for the day. However, he seems perfectly fine waking up that early and is raring to go. I am exhausted. 
