I am 31 years old and for most of my adult life I have been diagnosed with Manic Depression. I was taking Anti-Psychotic medication (which reeks havoc on your body) and gone through the worst ups and downs. I got my doctor to take me off the Anti-Psych's and just put me on Effexor and Wellbutrin which worked for awhile but then I started in with my mood swings, tardiness, missing work...you know the drill and went in to have my med's either upped or changed. When I go there he asked me to relay my systems exactly and then shocked me by stating that I may have been misdiagnosed all of these years. I am now on Wellbutrin (I still have depression) and Adderall and have never felt better in my life. Has anyone else ever experienced this or know of anyone that they think may have been misdiagnosed?
If you read some of the older messages on this board, you'll realize that you are not the first person to have been misdiagnosed. I'm not sure which is worse...being misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. People are falling through the cracks all the time because it is still a common belief that ADD/ADHD does not exist or is not a serious illness.
When I was first diagnosed everyone thought that it was a great excuse for why I acted the way I did but that was all that it was...an excuse. It wasn't until I was medicated for a couple of months and started acting like the responsible adult that I was supposed to be that people around me started realizing that there might be something to this ADD thing.
I hope that your depression turns out to be a side effect of the mental torture that you were obviously going through before your diagnosis. It's common for people with undiagnosed ADD to be diagnosed with depression mostly because they are frustrated to the point of break-down with not being able to figure out why they are so different from everyone else and so socially maladjusted (is that a word?).
Anyway, welcome to the group, I hope you find some useful information here...and maybe even some friends.
Hi- just a note to agree with both of you! Not to be making excuses for pdocs or even clients, but it's not hard for me to understand why there's 'mis'diagnosis or 'falling through the cracks': 1 is that there are several fairly closely related 'disorders' in this area; 2 is that it therefore takes good insight into patient behavior and underlying psycho/physiology, which it is hard for both patient and doc to really do justice to ($$, time, mental difficulty going thru screenings, etc.); 3 is that often patients are NOT precise or very articulate about what's going on with them; 4 is that often patients don't tell all there is that should be known (embarrassment; hiding, denial, etc.); 5 is that once on meds, they need to run a course for a while before they might need to be adjusted--I mean, you have to see what happens, you know?, AND you're not likely seeing the pdoc more for further insight about disorder, so you probably won't be re-diagnosed even if you need it. And there are more. I'm sure you and others have experienced one or more of these, some people all of them (including me and more than once, unfortunately). Not to mention frustration and just not pursuing followup or not taking meds or taking them the way they're prescribed. I won't go on, but just say, hang in there, and it seems like the silver-lining, so to speak, is that you've found some kind of 'right spot' at this point, so hurrah!
