I sure hope that someone and help me out here. I have a 7 yr old son that has been dianosed as having ADHD and has been given the following drugs. During a 2 1/2 period. Adderal,Wellbutrin,Concerta and different forms of ritalin. They will work for 6-8 weeks and do great for school. As far as being calm, completing work and staying focused. However his mood swings are continually getting worse. To the point now that I am concerned for his and our saftey. He has threaten to cut himself in two. I have had to hide all sharp objects. And is forever hitting himself or hitting/kicking walls. And tells me in a very angry tone, teeth/fist clenched, that I have runined his life. And after 15-30 minutes he is fine and like nothing happened. We have an appointment with his doctor Friday and I would just like some advice.


[This message has been edited by ruatwittsend2 (edited 03-19-2003).]

Yikes! Sounds pretty scary. Your son just may not be able to tolerate the stimulant meds. We have recently switched our son from concerta to strattera because he hasn't gained any weight in the past year and he also has tourettes disorder and the stimulants make the tics worse. We have been on the strattera for 4 weeks now with a recent dose increase at the end of last week. Just when I thought I was ready to throw in the towel on this one things seem to be looking up. I gained and different perspective looking at the effects of the strattera with some help from my sister and a friend. Up to this point I had been judging my son and how he was on this med. compared to the concerta, but have just realized what I need to do is look at my son from the perspective of him just being and 8 year old boy and how this med is helping him to be just that. He does not need to be perfectly focused or perfectly calm he just needs to be able to function as any other boy his age functions! Wow! What a breakthrough for me. So I am due to talk to his teacher at the end of the week and we have an appt. with his psychologist also at the end of the week and I'm going to ask them to also look at it from this perspective and not compared to how he was on the concerta. And we'll go from there. You may want to try another non-stimulant medication such as wellbutrin (I have not personally tried this but other people have said it helps with moods and attention problems, or the strattera ( the draw back to this one is sleepiness in the beginning and it takes a while to build up to see any effects.) I hope this helps you, one of the things that we did notice with my son on the stimulant meds. is he had any underlying anger in him and focused toward himself. We are not seeing that in him now. Something to think about. Good luck.

Hi..
Sorry to hear of your problems... I think you are doing the right thing in getting him re-evaluated right away...My ADD son was given neurontin for a while when we were backing off of Adderal due to tics... we thought for a time he may be bi-polar as well... grandpa had it and I know there is sometimes a genetic component to that. It seemed to help his mood swings a bit but did nothing for his inattention problems. He was nonviolent during this time however, but had a lot of anger issues. When he was first diagnosed with ADD we tried dexedrine and he exhibited some of the same symptoms your son is having, hitting his head against the wall, saying he wanted to die, cutting the head off his little sister's Barbie with a kitchen knife.... scary stuff. They put him on welbutrin which made hime very depressed. All of those destructive behaviors dissappeared when we took him off the dex. I hope you have success in getting him the correct medications,,, soon. I know what a nightmare living in that situation is and how helpless you feel.

Michelle

First, my support in what you're feeling and how tough the struggle seems. I'm still searching for a good med for my daughter but I couldn't help but write. Almost 3 years ago (she was 8)we were experiencing similar things - big big mood swings. With her father being bi-polar I mentioned this to her doctor. He prescribed a type of bi-polar medication (it wasn't depakote but in a similar family) and I found out quickly that she's not bi-polar. She exhibited great anxiety about going outside at a friends house because she had seen a bee - and she's totally an outdoors person. She was very very fearful and everything was amplifide - her emotions, her fears. It was terrible. So we took her off. The only other thing I might mention is that she cannot take anything that is not time-released or she has MAJOR rebound - just like the way you described - it would last about 30 - 40 minutes and then be totally gone. One other thing - Mary had a total allergic reaction to red dye which would present the same outbursts. Afterwards, she would be sleepy and almost lethargic. We found red dye in pizza, hotdogs, punch, cotton candy, in many things you could never imagine. Definitely, food allergies CAN get this response.