[from: “the more recent diary of myself” — started april 2008]
I’m been on Prozac, then Dr. Soni prescribed me, at 21, these drugs that just made me feel groggy and hung-over all the time. This new doc, Dr. Sultan, has got me on ‘Depakote’ and ‘Respiridone’. I don’t know what each one’s effect is independent of the other, but combined they make me feel more relaxed, more normal, less like my life is stuck in fast-forward. Conversations, unlike before, aren’t awkward because I’m not trying to rush through them as I would normally do. So I feel more patient with myself, and others. This is wonderful, I don’t feel like I’m winding every conversation anymore, and has helped me socially. Apart from the general feeling of moving at a slower, more normal pace, no other changes can be noted. All the other symptoms of ADHD are still present. I’m still hyperactive, often tiring myself out with excessive movement. However, I like this symptom, it keeps me fit and active, and the more active I am, the clearer I can think. I’m The impulsiveness and inattention is still bad. Most worrying is my tendency to not be able to take in enough information at once to judge when to safely cross the road, and my immediate inappropriate reactions to certain things. And I can’t study properly. What else?
I’m disorganised. I’m improving this by writing lists and plans and referring back to them whenever I remember, but I’m still bad. I never remember to look at the plans. And I don’t think things through properly. I just settle with the first chunk of information that comes into my head and it’s hard fitting more in. For me, because my brain works differently, any information processed comes in these chunks, instead of specific and necessary information. Basically, I have to sift through all the other stuff that I can’t filter out to get the stuff I need. In conversations, I can’t filter a single voice out from other noise, and the same applies for any type of information. While reading it’s hard to filter out single words from the bulky image of a paragraph. I think I’ll split the whole thing down to the three parts of ADHD: inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity.
Inattention:
There are components of the process of attention:
It seems as though I need to do what naturally happens with other people. Firstly, it’s hard to choose what to focus on. There’s so much so take in, it’s often very difficult to prioritise, especially in hasty situations. Next, it’s hard to sustain focus on a selected stimulus (a piece of information taken in). There’s so much other stuff that might be important or interesting, it’s not always possible to keep my attention on just one thing for a long period of time. This is most annoying for me when I’m crossing the road, since I sometimes can’t concentrate long enough to make sure I don’t get knocked down. This goes into dividing attention. Because of all this input, it’s hard to decide what to focus on and what to ignore. Thus we move into shifting focus: if you’re constantly operating your attention process in manual, rather than automatic, then you’re going to have to shift a lot, and chances are you will get it wrong sometimes, or maybe even forget altogether.