No. It’s adderall. I’ve been hesitant to make this post for obvious reasons, but I feel rather compelled to in the off chance someone rolls onto this. It was reading personal stories that made me think this was something to look into.
I’ve had depression issues for about as long as I can remember. I’ve tried a handful of meds over the years to no avail. The closest thing I’ve ever had to resolve it has been drinking energy drinks. That would buy me a good hour or so of peace and then I’d sink again. Finally it was recommended by the ex-wife of all people that I may just have ADHD or something. I did some research online and finally decided to give this a try. It took 6 months and $800 from the time I floated the idea to a doc to when I finally got a prescription written.
Outside of books, adderall is the single greatest non-living thing to come into my life. My guns, my truck; nothing has had so positive on influence upon my life as adderall. Antidepressants didn’t work to fix my depression the way adderall did. I’m written up for 10mg twice a day. This is a pretty small dosage and normally I only take 1 a day. Many days I don’t take any.
Honestly I can’t say that it’s done a lot for any attention issues, but it has almost completely gutted any depression I’ve had. My whole life I’m managed with just crushing fatigue. I’ve been able to do what I must when I must, but rarely had the desire to do what I wanted. For most of my life, my days have been a fight to get out of bed and a desire to find my way back there when the working day is done. (John, you may know this as “doing laundry”) Adderall has relieved me of that. I do have attention issues, but the depression was 100 times more severe. The only place adderall has helped my attention was in, well, wanting to study rather than going to sleep.
I’ve only been doing this for a month, and I’m worried about building a tolerance (though my dosage is extremely low) so I probably don’t take as much as I should. I’ve always been hesitant about using meds, but this is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Honestly, I’d rather lose out on the Bar for the rest of my life than to lose the energy that this has given me.
So my theory as it stands is that the depression has come from my lack of productivity. I’ve often put my personal value on the ability to produce (Atlas Shrugged anyone?) When I couldn’t focus or even find the energy to want to stay out of bed, my productivity suffered, causing a sinking of my self-worth.
