Son Out Of Control

[gipsy-7]

Why can't he get medication for the entire day? At least for the time being?

I always like to compare it to a kitchen ;-)

Just imagine you've had a messy kitchen all your life. All of a sudden you manage to tidy up and get it all shiny and sparkling. The telephone rings and you walk out of the kitchen but it's the wrong number. Two minutes later you are back and you kitchen is in a right state, worse than ever before. Dirty dishes everywhere, food everywhere, tomato sauce on the walls, flour distributed to remotest corner of your kitchen, puddles of lemonade, beer and milk on the worktops, table and floor, food rotting away on the table ...
Would you stay calm and cool?

That is what it is like when a rebound "hits" you. And all that once a day, every day.
While on medication your thoughts, your perception, almost everything inside you is in balance and all of a sudden everything goes haywire. You don't have any routines or any behavioural patterns to fall back on because you've never had the chance to learn these.

Of course, it is important to learn strategies to cope in such a way that they are automated. (That's the aim of behavioural therapy.)
A lot of our immediate reactions are automated over the years. You just react without thinking about it (like driving a car, after some time changing gears etc. is not a matter of "thinking about it", you just do it automatically). Once you manage to replace some unwanted immediate reactions and replace them with other automated behavioural patterns you may also be able to apply these when you don't have the aid of medication.

It's not easy, especially not at the age of 12 (it's easier with younger kids), and my experience with our kids is that this doesn't work as long as the medication isn't right. Our 13-year-old daughter is also very aggressive, not so much physically but with words, bullying her brother and sisters etc.
Even though she was on medication it was getting worse and worse. Recently we put her on different medication and this works a lot better. Now we are getting somewhere with her behavioural problems, it seems for the first time she actually understands what we are talking about. We are all working hard on it (always have done) but for the first time it seems more than another wasted effort.

There is always hope!

[cyburham]

It sounds like we are in the same boat. As we increased my 9 yr old sons adderall higher he also started to become depressed, moody and destructive. The doctor has taken him off of the adderall and now he is on Seroquel and Wellbutrin. He has been on this for 2 days and I am going crazy. He is Happy again for which I am grateful, but extremely wild and not thinking at all. How did your son act on the wellbutrin? We are out of options. My son seems to develop immunity to meds very fast. They work great for a while and then we have to increase them until he either develops ticks or serious side effects. My Son was born drug addicted and is extremely hyper. Like your son this behavior started as a toddler. It seems everything we try only works for a short time.
Any Suggestions?

[cosen]

i am watching my niece full time while her mom works she is three .. can u help me i think she has add .. from 7 am to 4 p.m. she sits down NOT ONCE she opens the nailpolish, the c.d. cases, all the drawers and cabinets, the refrigerator, takes things out one by one and destroys them, dumps the cheerios, won't watch t.v. or sit and color, touches everything i say don't touch and she doesn't respond . she has no hearing problem .. she has to eat constantly, drink constantly, do everything i do have everything i have if i say you're not allowed upstairs she goes anyway
i am very gentle and patient .. she is driving me crazy
she also has seizures
i dont know if the medication is doing this but she does not seem a normal three year old
is this what your child was doing at that age?

[index.html]

Cocen, personally I think 3 is too young to be thinking about ADD.

It's possible that her medication aggravates her behavior. It is also possible that her seizure disorder is to blame.

Is she calmer at home?

[MelissaNC]

Our doctors said that it couldn't accurately be diagnosed until they hit 6 or 7 years old, so I wouldn't be thinking about it too much at three years old, either. She may just be a totally inquisitive child who lacks discipline. But I'm not there, and I'm not a doctor, so I can't say for sure.

As for the anger issue, we haven't had that too badly with our 12 year old...no more than with ANY 12 year old boy, anyway. What we DID experience with the Adderall was a horrible reaction with the changing hormones of puberty. Bryson was on Adderall for a couple of years and it worked excellently for him. Once puberty started, though, he began having big problems. He was NEVER hungry. I don't mean he ate very little, I mean we had to force him to eat anything at all. He said that eating made him sick to his stomach, and he always felt really full (bloated). He couldn't sleep. At all some days. We tried Benadryl right before bedtime at his doctor's suggestion, and it didn't help at all. He became cranky and irritable because he wasn't sleeping, and caught every bug that came along because lack of proper food and sleep caused problems with his immune system. His immune system was already less than great because he was born with birth defects and has had 26 operations in 12 years, and they have taken their toll on it. Anyway, we just tried to deal with it until he reached the point where he did not eat or sleep at all for 3 days no matter what we did. His doctor said that, in his opinion, our son's hormone fluctuations, caused by puberty, were reacting badly with the Adderall. We took him off of it, gave him a little time to get it fully out of his system, and put him on Ritalin LA. He can now function at school (perhaps not quite as great as originally with the Aderall, but still pretty darn good) and can eat and sleep just fine.

So many of you posted that your kids are at the ages to be entering, or in the middle of, puberty, and they are having problems with the Adderall. I wonder how much of it is a clash between the hormones & the Adderall? In a way I hope that's it, because they'll outgrow puberty before too awefully long...