Can Adderall or stimulant medication actually make ADD worse over a long period of time?

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i think its possible, because excessive amounts of dopamine burn out other cell receptors, leading to cell loss, and eventual brain damage, making it even harder to concentrate and focus later in life. dopamine is needed to focus, but taking a medication to stimulate dopamine activity is not natural, and it will do more bad then good, in the long run. its this: If your house is cold, would you burn the furniture in your house, to make it warm? not that im against medication, its just that there are always other options to solving a problem.

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I started taking stimulant medication since I was in 8'th grade. My senior year I started taking too much of it because I wanted to prevent the emotional down that happens when it wears off. My doctor got scared that I would start abusing it, or that I aleady was, so she has been taking me off of it slowly since then. By my third year in college I was almost completely off of adderall. My life was more awful the less I took, because I no longer knew how to deal with having ADD symptoms. I have just got a new doctor and am going back onto adderall again. I'm not sure if my ADD is worse. I don't think it is but I could be wrong. I think it's just that I'm not used to having to contain and control the problems that come with having ADD. If I hadn't taken the medication until now, I would have probably learned how to deal with my symptoms better than I am able today. Some people even say that you can train your brain to not even have symptoms, expecially during your youth. (Biofeedback might help with training your brain as well). By taking pills that took away my ADD problems, I didn't have to learn meathods of dealing, and I didn't have to train my brain. Thus I missed out on making my ADD better. But I don't think the ADD is any worse than it used to be; I just have to re-learn selfrestraint. I also don't think that you could ever train your brain completely to have no ADD problems. My boyfriend has ADD but was never given medication for it. While he can deal with his ADD better than I could right now off my pills, his symptoms by no means have disapeared. Plus I have met several adults who have never gotten treatment and are still haveing big problems. If I could do it all again I would have taken stimulants even earlier in life. It has turned my life around. Stimulants have enabled me to preform better in school. For the first time in my life I actually got A's and B's. I started taking better care of myself because they motivated me to be more productive. I don't know if I could have ever made it into college if I didn't have adderall or other stimulants. When I have the right medication, I can major in anything I want--even subjects that require a lot of work. Otherwise I would have to major in something that didn't require a lot of attention, like art, or hospitality management. One of my friends who has not recieved any treatment was trying a difficult major and he is now 26 and only a junior because he has had to repeat classes. He is not dumb at all; he just can't concentrate on anything. I learned from doctors that people who don't treat ADD also can have problems with depression too, which I have seen examples of in some of my friends with ADD. If you are willing to be on medication for maybe even your whole life, it would definately improve your life. If you are not willing and you still take meds, when you come off your meds, it will be a lot harder to deal with it than it would have been. However, you would have the benefit of having a more productive life for the period that you were on meds.

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I've been taking either Ritalin or Dexedrine for 15 years. My ADD isn't worse. I've had more symptoms of old age pop in, but going from age 35 to 50 would account for being more tired now and more forgetful as well. After all those years, if something dastardly was going to happen, it would have by now. I know life without stimulant medication would not be worth living.

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ummmmmm it would probably be inappropriate for me to answer this question in my immediate condition considering circa 40 minutes ago i just tossed up my container of dexies and hit a home run with my skateboard and watched those orange grommits go flying into the gulch outside my apartment. If my math is correct i am currently peaking from my last dose of orangemen that i took at 12:00 (it is 2:08 PST). I have been taking the short acting dexidrine 3 times a day since a week after graduating high school. i am currently a sophomore in college. my life since high school in three hundred million ways has been three hundred million times different. if my life ended today there would be no doubt i would consider the last 15 or so months to be the most prolific era of my life. I did AMAZING things. Now this is not to say that these are some miracle drug, i also tried sooooooo much harder and dreamed sooooooo much bigger than i ever had. im not exactly sure what went wrong, it went wrong, or if something actually did go wrong. there are soo many ways to look at things, and i can't choose one. All i know is i couldn't hang anymore with my current situation and so i just chucked them. My testimony cannot be taken as anything close to a standard or ordinary case however. I did not go about getting treated in an orthodox way by any means. when i was diagnosed with ADD i didn't even know what to think. I took it pretty acceptingly, and i was pretty much the only one. None of my friends really beleived me or even believed in ADD. None of them even do now. I don't think anybody beleives in ADD, and they've got me wondering if i even believe in it. In retrospect, you probably shouldn't take much from this testimony, i probably shouldn't even have written it. Perhaps i shall come back in a few weeks and edit it once i have undergone the grave magnitude of imminent change resulting from my recent actions. I have to go to class.

First answer by Imayhavejustmadeahugemistake. Last edit by Discussabm. Contributor trust: 10 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 141 [recommend question]