<story><title>Ritalin Gone Wrong</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.html </url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dlytle</author><text>I&apos;m currently taking adult ADD meds (Adderall); it&apos;s a double edged sword, and I&apos;d personally really prefer to find another method.&lt;p&gt;The primary problem is, during any sort of transition I would be pretty useless, and I can&apos;t afford to take that long being useless with my current job.&lt;p&gt;I went cold turkey from 25mg of Adderall XR daily, and for about a week and a half I was absolutely dead.  I&apos;d have a splitting headache due to dehydration, but I couldn&apos;t summon the energy to get off the couch and walk 12 feet to where I had bottles of water.  I&apos;m glad I went cold turkey rather than just tapering the dose, though, because tapering the dose would have taken months of feeling miserable, rather than 1.5 weeks of feeling like a dead man.&lt;p&gt;If you hear anything interesting from people about biofeedback/etc, long-term non-medicinal adult ADD treatments, could you toss me a mail at taloen@gmail.com?  I&apos;d really like to see other peoples&apos; opinions on those routes, and I don&apos;t lurk enough on HN to be likely to see a submission about it.&lt;p&gt;(Just to clarify; yes, I&apos;m back on the Adderall XR again, although at 5mg rather than 25 this time.)</text></item><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>I was interested to see that the researcher who wrote the op-ed, a psychologist based at my alma mater, has participated in some of the research projects he reviews in the op-ed. As I read the comments here, I&apos;ll be collecting ideas for questions to ask the local researcher in person as I try to learn more about ADD. I was particularly interested to see that the op-ed criticized several earlier studies for their study designs.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I first became interested in what adult ADD treatments do after seeing a testimonial from an HN participant, a programmer, who said that his productivity increased dramatically after beginning ADD medication as an adult. I have since read parts of quite a few of the recent scholarly publications on ADD, especially those that focus on adult ADD, to try to wrap my mind around the trade-offs of medical treatment versus other approaches to symptom management. (I&apos;m also still trying to make sense of just how ADD is defined, especially among adults who were not deemed to have ADD in childhood. The definitional issues are rather complicated.)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder/complete-index.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/attention-defici...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-edge-newspaper-2011/mar-18b.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-edge-newspaper-2011/mar-18...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another participant here has already commented that there may be other interventions to consider when grappling with problems of attention focus. What are the best sources on other interventions (diet, lifestyle, etc.)? What are the trade-offs of those? For the occupations most pursued by participants on Hacker News, do you find it helpful to seek ADD medication if you are found to have ADD symptoms? What do your loved ones and colleagues think about your performance on a before-and-after basis if you have tried treatment? On the whole, ADD seems to involve a minority of participants in any occupation, but perhaps a more significant minority among HN participants than among some other subsets of the human population. I&apos;m still trying to get a reality check, and would like to learn more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tripzilch</author><text>I tried a few sessions of bio-feedback but quit because I got frustrated by it and not being worth the time and money.&lt;p&gt;During the intake the therapist described Ritalin as &quot;poison&quot;. I should have probably gotten up and left right there. If you have the opinion that Ritalin is overprescribed, or that it should not be given to small children, that&apos;s all fine with me. But &quot;poison&quot; has a pretty clear definition, you&apos;ll find that whenever someone refers to a drug as &quot;poison&quot;, you&apos;re dealing with pseudo-scientific quackery.&lt;p&gt;What made me quit was mostly that I couldn&apos;t find any correlation between the signals received from the electrodes and my own state of consciousness, be it more relaxed or more concentrated or alpha/beta waved, whatever.&lt;p&gt;When I watched the graphs on the monitor, I noticed a few things. There is a LOT of noise. If I&apos;d clench my jaw, move a muscle in my neck, my ears, whatever, it&apos;d cause an avalanche of noise, completely drowning out any possible brain signal. Ok so you sit still, you&apos;re meant to focus or relax anyhow. Except that muscles just seem to generate a whole lot more electrical signal than your brain, and every time I even &lt;i&gt;blinked my eye&lt;/i&gt; there was a burst of noise (probably also because the eye muscle is relatively close to the electrodes). The software did nothing to filter out these noise-bursts, even though it&apos;d have been trivial to make at least a basic attempt that would throw away the data during a burst so the other filters wouldn&apos;t trigger.&lt;p&gt;Ah, the &lt;i&gt;other&lt;/i&gt; filters. Well, it quickly became clear I knew a lot more about DSP than this guy. He had no idea how his device operated, at least not how the signals were transformed into whatever was displayed on the screen. There&apos;s not really an excuse for this. Sure enough a surgeon might not know about the algorithms used to convert an MRI scan into a picture, but the radiologist &lt;i&gt;does&lt;/i&gt; (at least, on some level), which is why we have radiologists.&lt;p&gt;So you know about these alpha/beta/theta/gamma brain waves right? They&apos;re at 12/10/7/3 Hz frequencies or something like that. Now I always had the idea that by this they meant some fundamental Eigen-frequency of signals in the brain, so you&apos;d &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; to apply some auto-correlation to determine the base frequency and its harmonics. But instead he had a bunch of bandpass filters running concurrently being graphed through some ancient MS-DOS program with obvious leakage from one band to another and we were looking at the raw filtered signal, not even its energy and as I said there was &lt;i&gt;no&lt;/i&gt; noise suppression.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d have loved to take that device home, write some code for it and see what it could detect though. Hell, even detecting muscle movements is already way cool :)&lt;p&gt;Anyway, no correspondence between my state of focus or relaxation.&lt;p&gt;Staring at a computer screen (with a game, usually one frequency band was used to control a game of some sort) for 1-2 hours per week, actively trying to relax or focus would definitely have a result of course.&lt;p&gt;Which is why I&apos;m doing a universal yoga meditation class. Dunno if it helps with the ADD, but it can&apos;t hurt and it definitely has some other advantages (notably: posture and stress/tension). One thing I do notice, yoga works best if I haven&apos;t taken meds that day. You&apos;d think it improves focus, but this yoga class is mainly being able to really feel your whole body and muscles should not be tense for that, but on meds I find I get way more fidgety and subconsciously re-tense every muscle I relax as my focus shifts to the next part of my body. Fortunately, noticing and being aware of such subtle effects in your body is exactly what the class it about :-)</text></comment>
<story><title>Ritalin Gone Wrong</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.html </url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dlytle</author><text>I&apos;m currently taking adult ADD meds (Adderall); it&apos;s a double edged sword, and I&apos;d personally really prefer to find another method.&lt;p&gt;The primary problem is, during any sort of transition I would be pretty useless, and I can&apos;t afford to take that long being useless with my current job.&lt;p&gt;I went cold turkey from 25mg of Adderall XR daily, and for about a week and a half I was absolutely dead.  I&apos;d have a splitting headache due to dehydration, but I couldn&apos;t summon the energy to get off the couch and walk 12 feet to where I had bottles of water.  I&apos;m glad I went cold turkey rather than just tapering the dose, though, because tapering the dose would have taken months of feeling miserable, rather than 1.5 weeks of feeling like a dead man.&lt;p&gt;If you hear anything interesting from people about biofeedback/etc, long-term non-medicinal adult ADD treatments, could you toss me a mail at taloen@gmail.com?  I&apos;d really like to see other peoples&apos; opinions on those routes, and I don&apos;t lurk enough on HN to be likely to see a submission about it.&lt;p&gt;(Just to clarify; yes, I&apos;m back on the Adderall XR again, although at 5mg rather than 25 this time.)</text></item><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>I was interested to see that the researcher who wrote the op-ed, a psychologist based at my alma mater, has participated in some of the research projects he reviews in the op-ed. As I read the comments here, I&apos;ll be collecting ideas for questions to ask the local researcher in person as I try to learn more about ADD. I was particularly interested to see that the op-ed criticized several earlier studies for their study designs.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I first became interested in what adult ADD treatments do after seeing a testimonial from an HN participant, a programmer, who said that his productivity increased dramatically after beginning ADD medication as an adult. I have since read parts of quite a few of the recent scholarly publications on ADD, especially those that focus on adult ADD, to try to wrap my mind around the trade-offs of medical treatment versus other approaches to symptom management. (I&apos;m also still trying to make sense of just how ADD is defined, especially among adults who were not deemed to have ADD in childhood. The definitional issues are rather complicated.)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder/complete-index.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/attention-defici...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-edge-newspaper-2011/mar-18b.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-edge-newspaper-2011/mar-18...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another participant here has already commented that there may be other interventions to consider when grappling with problems of attention focus. What are the best sources on other interventions (diet, lifestyle, etc.)? What are the trade-offs of those? For the occupations most pursued by participants on Hacker News, do you find it helpful to seek ADD medication if you are found to have ADD symptoms? What do your loved ones and colleagues think about your performance on a before-and-after basis if you have tried treatment? On the whole, ADD seems to involve a minority of participants in any occupation, but perhaps a more significant minority among HN participants than among some other subsets of the human population. I&apos;m still trying to get a reality check, and would like to learn more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qrybam</author><text>Scary thought: Going cold turkey with coffee has had very similar effects on me (after 2 weeks of 1-2 cups a day; 2-4 shots/day).&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve also had a similar feeling of deadness when I stopped eating meat, dairy and anything with additives for 6 weeks. The first week or so I was completely useless - this could have also been due to me trying to feel my way through to a balanced diet.&lt;p&gt;So much of what we consume ends up having all sorts of unknown effects on us and the minute we stop consuming them we really feel it - it&apos;s easier to never stop.&lt;p&gt;One bonus of cutting certain stimulants out of my life has been that I&apos;ve ended up feeling much better.</text></comment>