Question about medication
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Question about medication
| Wed, 11-29-2006 - 1:17pm |
I was here a while ago asking how to convince a teen to try medication. We are passed that point, and now trying to figure out WHAT to medicate. I just assumed that a doctor would make the final call on that, but it turns out that it's a little more complicated than that. He was diagnosed with ADHD, and there are some professionals involved who think THAT is what we should be medicating. On the other hand, his two current counsellors think that what would should be medicating for is ANXIETY. They've gone so far as to suggest that perhaps the ADHD is a misdiagnosis. See, he's got Post Traumatic Stress Syndrowme, and suffers significant trauma issues due to many, many years of loss and abuse. The counsellors think that the stres and hypervigilance of anxiety and PTSD can mimic the symptoms of ADHD. We CAN'T get him into an actual Child Psychiatrist until at least spring- so our family doctor, who has some training in mental health and psychotropic meds in children is who we are going to be seeing in a couple weeks. HE is willing to go either way on this one, according to what I think we should be trying first. OMG - that's a heck of a burden! And I know I'm only going to get one good shot at this, because if his first experience with medication is negative, it'll be impossible to get him to try anything else. I know what my gut feeling is, but does anyone else have any thoughts or insight?

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It’s good we have several posters here who have had experience with these specific meds and/or work in this field who can give some good advice. All I can do is share what we went through.
Our oldest DS (25) is deaf from meningitis contracted at 16 months old. This also caused a frontal lobe brain injury, which severely affected his judgment and problem solving skills. So we had this boy with an IQ solidly in the genius range, who learned German in 4 weeks, aced college calculus in the 7th grade, but also thought the best solution to accidentally locking himself out of the house was to break the picture window. kwim?
Then schizophrenia manifested at age 15. He was full blown out of reality. The poor kid really got the triple whammy.
His third psychiatrist (and current one for 7 years) I credit for actually saving his life.
The science of psychotropic meds was all new to me. I was amazed at how hit and miss this field is. It took several attempts of many different meds to get results.
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We had the same concern. What we stressed with DS is the meds would either help him or have no effect on him. Of course, he felt he didn’t need any medication. (Why would you, when you’re in direct communication with Jesus Christ ?..:-)
Our situation seems a bit more severe than what you’re experiencing, but if your DS can’t buy in to this process of trying something until it works, I’d really suggest good old fashioned bribery. *Anything* to get those meds down the hatch..Good luck!
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PTSD can cause a lot of ADHD type symptoms, and if you think that's where a lot of his behaviors are coming from, I'd go with that first I guess.
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