I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the anxiety increasing side-effects on stimulants made me into a gibbering wreck. My extreme reaction was part of what got me the OCD diagnosis as I was forced to come clean about some of the thought patterns I had been unwilling to discuss. I still believe I have ADHD as with appropriate therapy the OCD symptoms are largely gone, but the ADHD ones are not. I also have a number of other family members on my maternal side who have ADHD diagnosis or would have if they werern't from an older generation (most notably my mother, from whom I have learnt all the coping mechanisms that allow me to get by without meds). Complicating things further, my mother's side of the family has an abnormally high number of people with bipolar disorder, which is also understood to have a relationship to OCD. I am not bipolar however, and neither is my mother.
There is a strange psychology rabbit hole to go down with the inter-relation between the conditions. Each population is more likely to be diagnosed witht he other condition than the general populace -- yet our biochemical theories for how each works should make having both impossible. One is believed to be caused by too much dopamine, the other too little.
Related to this, after a first attempt at stimulants, I was given an anti-smoking medication that has off-label use as an ADHD treatment. It works by increasing dopamine levels. This was even worse than stimulants, but I wouldn't have called the effect as increasing the obsessive-compulsive symptoms, more I just felt very very stressed and about a hair-width from a breakdown for a week.
pringk02|2 years ago
There is a strange psychology rabbit hole to go down with the inter-relation between the conditions. Each population is more likely to be diagnosed witht he other condition than the general populace -- yet our biochemical theories for how each works should make having both impossible. One is believed to be caused by too much dopamine, the other too little.
Related to this, after a first attempt at stimulants, I was given an anti-smoking medication that has off-label use as an ADHD treatment. It works by increasing dopamine levels. This was even worse than stimulants, but I wouldn't have called the effect as increasing the obsessive-compulsive symptoms, more I just felt very very stressed and about a hair-width from a breakdown for a week.