Posts Tagged: attention deficit disorder

ADHD Traits — No Comments
26
Apr 12

Overcorrecting ADD Behavior

My office is a nightmare. The shelves are crammed with what was originally placed on the shelf, plus all of the things that were stuffed on to of those things. There are file folders on top of books, there are books on top of files, the lesser used printer has stuff that can’t be chanced with getting lost on one of those full shelves. Behind me, the floor is piled high with papers, file boxes, laptop bags (I seem to collect them), and plenty more stuff. The irony is that while I have never been a neat person, my office never used to get this bad. It is truly terrible now, thanks to me being diagnosed with ADD, but not for the reason you think.

Correcting ADHD Behavior

Many have noted that being diagnosed with ADHD can actually be liberating at first. There is a great sense of relief at knowing the name for what has been going on for all these years. Frankly, Attention Deficit Disorder isn’t really all that scary sounding. To me, that sounds way better than something like depression or even Seasonal Affected Disorder, with its unfortunate acronym telling you exactly how to feel about that one.

However, after a while, ADD becomes like any other chronic condition. You start to try and fix it, or manage it in some ways. There are often two components of ADD treatment. One is often ADHD medication, the other is behavior modification or therapy, usually in conjunction with a health professional or ADD coach. Either way, the self-aware ADDer will eventually become aware of at least some of the things that his or her ADD seems to propagate within their personality.

For me, the biggest problem I have in the entire world is procrastination. I have no doubt that I could have had success a hundred-fold above and beyond everything I have ever achieved in any arena in life if I could just stop procrastinating and get things done at even a semi-reasonable pace. Many ADDers report being unable to adequately focus and get going until a deadline looms. For me, the deadline must often pass, and the consequence be severe before I can get going. It is the one thing that I would gladly change about myself.

Knowing this, shortly after being told I have ADD I noticed myself organizing my office ahead of a huge, important project, with a very looming deadline. Like many ADDers, I had a reasonable excuse for this ADD trait kicking in. After all, I would be much more productive if everything were organized neatly and I could find what I was looking for right away.

The catch, of course, is that a full office organization of this kind can take hours, precious hours that should be spent on the task at hand. Organizing would have been helpful last week. Doing some of the 20 hours of work that are left before the deadline 12 hours away, would be much, much, more helpful. And so, I stopped.

Unfortunately, that was years ago and I haven’t really organized since. Every time I even think about organizing a list of important things to do floods my mind and I feel guilty for moving around even one scrap of paper, believing that what I am doing is procrastinating. Frankly, that is what I’m doing sometimes, but doing that occasionally would likely be better than getting to where the current state of my office is.

This is a sneaky ADD issue to avoid successfully. Often, in our attempts to better ourselves and “make up” for the various character trait of ADHD that cause us distress, we overreact. Shifting too far is often no better than staying where you were on the behavior spectrum. It can be difficult to see when you have overreacted, but there are some signs to look for.

Signs You Have Overcorrected for ADD

  1. You set a hard and fast rule – Life isn’t static. Things change. Organizing isn’t always procrastinating. Sometimes it is good, even necessary. If you have a “never” or “always” lurking in your mind, you may have overcompensated.
  2. The new situation is just as bad – Never cleaning leads to a state just as bad or worse than cleaning too often, or at the wrong times.
  3. You feel bad about doing something – Adjusting to ADD is about understanding how your mind works and making tweaks to the things that you want to in order to achieve your own goals, which should be primarily about happiness. If you’ve set up a structure that makes you feel bad about doing something, then chances are you’ve overcorrected. Stop and think about what you actually feel bad about. Should you really feel bad about that? Feeling bad about cleaning or organizing is not what I wanted. I wanted to be sure that I was doing it for the right reason at the right time, but it progressed to just feeling wrong about doing it at all. If you feel bad about overeating or not exercising or yelling at a spouse, that makes sense. I’m fine with feeling bad about those things. But if it doesn’t seem right that you feel negatively about something, then it probably isn’t.

Have you overcorrected  any of your ADD traits? What kinds of ADHD symptoms have you gone too far with?

ADHD Research Studies — No Comments
8
Oct 10

Natural Cure for ADD – Exercise

I’m not sure if we got on someone’s radar somehow, or if we are showing up in certain search results, but I have gotten an increasing number of comments and emails regarding exercise as a cure for ADD.

Let me start by saying that I am a proponent of alternative treatments for ADD, if you can find one that works for you. I am skeptical that any one little change to your lifestyle will result in a cure for ADHD in adults or children. In fact, if some little adjustment to how you go about your daily life “cures your ADD”, I would question how legitimate your diagnosis was in the first place.

ADD is not some little nitpicky, attitude adjustment waiting to happen. If you believe differently, you are in the wrong place.

That being said, let me also point out that exercise has been shown to have a beneficial effect on attention deficit disorder. Of course, it has been shown to have a beneficial effect on heart disease, depression, sleeping problems, fibromyalgia, and just about everything else that medical science has a name for. In fact, at this point, it is probably a waste of money to study whether exercise is helpful for medical conditions, because I think everyone with or without a medical degree or PhD can see a pattern here.

Of course, being helpful is not the same thing as a cure. For example, if you have heart disease and embark upon a medically sound exercise regimen, that is going to be very helpful, but you are fool if you have serious heart disease and you are not also taking prescription medications that can make an even bigger difference.

Likewise, while aerobic exercise might improve your ADD symptoms substantially, if it is not enough, then you should also avail yourself to other possible ADD treatments, alternative or otherwise, although you would be wise to continue exercising as well.

If you want a stronger endorsement of exercise as a cure-all for ADD or ADHD, you’re going to have to find someone trying to sell a book or an expensive, herbal supplement, or something, because I know that while exercise always makes me feel better in the long run, and does indeed help my attention issues somewhat, it is not enough to “cure” my ADHD.

ADHD Research Studies — 1 Comment
4
Oct 10

ADD Defective Genes?

A recent study (and you know how you should NEVER read too much into that) suggests that there MAY be a genetic basis for attention deficit disorder.

British researchers compared the genomes of 366 white British children with ADHD to 1,000 similar children without ADD. The idea is that if there are enough consistent differences among the children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder versus those who do not have ADD, then there is a chance that those genetic differences are either the cause of ADD or are indicators of a higher probability of developing ADHD.

Remember that genetic has proven to be incredibly complicated and even the simplest things like what color your eyes are turn out to be influenced by multiple genes in various locations. These genes often interact with other genes in order to actually affect the development of a human being.

In other words, you might not be able to have blond hair without a certain gene, but just because you have it, does not mean that you will get blond hair. It may depend on whether or not you have other genes and whether or not those genes are influenced by even more genes.

That being said, researchers determined that the “normal” population of children had “deleted or doubled chromosomes” 7 percent of the time, while in the children with ADD population, they detected the same thing 14 percent of the time. Additionally, researchers determined that children with learning disabilities had the same anomaly 36 percent of the time, although it does not say how many of those kids came from which set.

Obviously, this study in now way “proves” anything, although the numbers are certainly disparate enough that scientists will be looking at this line of thinking in future research studies.

Until then, this is just another of many possibilities, although it does make at least some sense considering that the prevailing wisdom current suggests that ADHD is inherited or at least influenced by heredity. In order for that to be the case, there would eventually need to be a biological or genetic determiner.

ADHD Traits — No Comments
27
Aug 10

Toughest Thing About ADD

The hardest part about ADHD in adults and ADD in kids is that no matter whether you take standard prescription drugs from a doctor, or work out your own drug-free alternative ADD treatment, nothing helps you focus on the RIGHT things.

That is, while Adderall may help you focus, there is nothing in it or Ritalin or Vyvanse that will make you focus on schoolwork or on that critical project due for work. They can help keep you focused and help you get distracted less often, but in the end, you have to make yourself focus on the right thing FIRST, and THEN the meds will help keep your focus in place. But, if you don’t get your focus on the subject you need to focus on, then all they do is help stop you from being distracted from something you shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

Who wants to guess what my top ADD issue is this morning?

Hope your day is more focused and productive than mine has been so far.

– ADDer

ADHD-ADD Tips — No Comments
18
Jul 10

Best ADD Tip Ever – The Only ADHD Advice You Need *

best-add-tip-adhd-secret Are you ready for the best ADD tip for overcoming ADHD symptoms? It is surprisingly easy, and once you see how this powerful attention deficit disorder tip can be for managing ADHD at work or school, you’ll want to use it all the time.

Is there a catch?

Well, did you see that asterisks up there? That means that there is a catch.

Overcoming Distraction to Get Work Done and Be Most Productive

The key concern when it comes to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is how constant distraction can be overcome in order to be more productive at school, more productive at work, and more productive at home. All the other ADD symptoms are sort of secondary. If ADDers could just get a handle on increasing productivity in the face of ADD, everything else would be a little easier to manage. (If you were as productive as you are capable of at work and around the house, do you think it would matter as much that you occasionally tune out or interrupt your spouse during conversations?)

To become more productive and improve your standing at work or improve your grades at school, the person with ADD need only do just one little thing: keep working.

See, I told you there was a catch.

However, hear me out. For those of us with ADD, the symptom of distractibility is one that keeps us from focusing properly on important tasks. When a major report is due the next day, we find ourselves intrigued by something else entirely. When this happens, there are only two choices. One choice involves using all of the ADHD tips and ADD tools that one can muster to overcome one’s natural tendency to have attention wander from the important tasks at hand, to those of lesser importance, or even no importance at all. The second choice involves just going with the flow, or allowing the mind’s attention to wander as it sees fit.

* The Catch: (That asterisks does indeed mean that there is a catch. Typically, it means a footnote, which is where some company uses really small fonts to explain how they are going to screw you over, and therefore cover themselves legally by “disclosing” the information that you need to realize that the whole thing is a scam. Here on Addessories, we have no reason to trick our fellow ADDers, so this explanatory asterisk is in full-size font type.) The catch is that in order to follow the path of least resistance and give into your mind’s typical urges to find ever more interesting things to focus on, you have to keep working longer than you would if you went the other route.

How much longer?

That is the essence of the catch. You have to keep working until you have finished that important task. That major report, or that semester-long project that you just started and is due tomorrow, must be finished before you stop working, whether that takes four hours or thirty-four hours. You’ll find that you are happier along the way, but the destination will end up being much further away than it should have.

Whether or not this is a good ADD trick for you depends entirely on whether you are the type of person with ADD who finds the journey more important than the destination, or whether you are the type of person with ADHD who finds crossing the finish line the most satisfying.

Which one are you?

ADHD Traits — No Comments
1
Jul 10

What Is Attention Deficit Disorder Like

Understanding attention deficit disorder, or ADD, requires getting past the pop culture version of ADHD, also called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and looking at what attention deficit disorder is really like.

First off, you need a basic understanding of the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. Once you have a basic grasp on the generalized symptoms of ADHD, you need to be aware that there are actually three forms of ADD all of which can be present in both adults and in children. After that, you will want to understand both the conventional ADD treatments of therapy, coaching, and prescription medications, as well as the bombardment of new, maybe works, kind of sort-of backed up by scientific data, alternative treatments for ADHD.

Of course, all of that only gives you a basic concept of what the condition is like in some prototype population like attention deficit disorder child or adult adhd labeled groups. None of that gives anyone a real grasp of what it is actually like to have ADD as an adult or as a teen or child. That is why from time to time I like to profile here on Addessories real life events or stories of an adult with ADHD. (It’s me.)

Deadline Today’s life with ADD episode comes courtesy of my small home office where I conduct my freelance writing business as a work from home dad. For the past three or four hours there has been a small empty plate on my desk. It comes and goes from my consciousness as I fling my fingers across the keyboard generating text that will hopefully pay the mortgage and more this month. When it arrives in my consciousness, or what I like to call “my front brain,” it annoys me a little bit because I can’t remember how it got there or what was on it. Also, I have had a terrible headache for the past 90 minutes because I’ve been thinking, “I need to go get something to drink,” for somewhere around 70 minutes, but I keep remembering in the middle of writing something and I know that if I stop, it might take me a while to get started again, or more likely, I might not be able to quite remember where I was going with my thoughts and I’ll have to start over altogether.

In a lot of ways this is nothing more than so much whining, except that none of this is uncommon.

When someone calls on the phone or a family member pops by my home office, they almost always have to wait for me to go to the restroom before they can talk to me. You see, while I am working my brain does scatter about distractedly from here to there, but one of the “theres” never seems to be my bodily functions. Rather, my mind wonders if I finished that article I started this morning, if there are better keywords than the ones I am using, and it can’t help but wonder what the plate is doing on my desk.

As it turns out, my wife brought me a sandwich and strawberries for lunch on that plate. Ah, that’s what it was.

Which brings us to today’s lesson in ADHD. People with ADHD are not forgetful, per se. While I struggled to come up with an idea of what the plate was doing on my desk that was less a function of being unable to remember and more a function of being unable to command some of the sections of my brain to stop doing whatever it was they are already doing and focus on the issue of the plate. Once the image of the strawberries popped back into my front brain (one of those brain centers apparently got around to processing some of the things in its queue, like what about the plate) I could remember everything about it.

I remember her appearing at my side with the plate. I remember that she had one too. I remember how good the strawberries were and what kind of sandwich it was. I also remember why I put the plate on my desk. (I wanted to remember to take it upstairs and not leave it on a shelf in my office.)

The point of all this noise is that the symptoms of ADD are not necessarily comical stereotypes of forgetful space cadets, but rather the manifestation of what happens when, in some cases (not all the time), one cannot calm the brain down enough to get it to do the front brain’s bidding and instead, the rest of the brain (the back brain, if you will) continues on with what it already had determined — often at the front brain’s command — what was currently important and that new requests would simply have to wait.

In other words, this isn’t the absent minded professor. ADHD is the command center switchboard with too many urgent requests coming in from the field. The good news is that if you can wait around a minute, your call will be answered in the order it was received.

ADD Medication — No Comments
14
Jun 10

ADHD Prescriptions Are Controlled Substances

As any anyone with ADHD can tell you, the drugs for ADD are classified as controlled substances. You can’t get refills of ADHD prescriptions, you have to get a new prescription for every time you get your monthly supply of Adderall or Ritalin. Likewise, the pharmacy cannot call your doctor to get an approval for your ADD prescription for you like they can for other drugs like antibiotics or insulin. Of course, this also means that you cannot take advantage of the discounts or convenience for getting  your prescriptions in a 90-day supply via mail order from your insurance company, either.

Too bad, because it would be a great ADHD advice tip to have people who aren’t good at organization and remembering to-do lists to have their medication automatically mailed each month.

All drugs (not supplements – there is a difference) are controlled substances by virtue of being “controlled” by the DEA and the FDA. What people with attention deficit disorder may not realize is how ADHD drugs are classified.

Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, Vyvanse, and all the generic equivalents are classified as “Schedule II” controlled substances.

That may not sound absurd at first, but believe me, it is asinine and yet another example of why the so-called war on drugs is so messed up.

Adderall Is As Bad As Morphine or Cocaine

There are technically five schedules used for classifying drugs. Schedule I drugs are the “bad” drugs, the ones that get smuggled in by villains using super speedboats and hollowed out dolls, depending upon the movie. These are the narcotic drugs and they include Heroin, Ecstasy, Marijuana, and LSD. Ironically, cocaine is not on this list which is going to make your Adderall meds being on the next list all the more pathetic.

Schedule II drugs are the very next set of medications. This is where ADD medicines are classified, just one step below Heroin and meth. It is also where cocaine is classified, as well as all of those pain killers that you hear about people getting addicted to.

How are ADHD medicines like Adderall and Ritalin grouped with pain killers and cocaine?

The law states that in order to be classified as a Schedule II controlled substance three factors must be met:

  1. There is a high potential for abuse
  2. There are valid medical reasons for using the drug (this is the difference between Schedule I and II)
  3. Abuse of the drug may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence

Wow!

Number 3 is a newsflash to me. No one every told me that taking mixed amphetamine salts could lead to severe dependence!

Of course, the reason no one ever told me that, is because it is not true.

There have been no medical studies that suggest that taking ADD medication like Adderall leads to any kind of dependence at all, except for having to get used to its affects going away. Certainly there is no medical data that these medications cause severe dependence.

As for abuse, the only thing I have ever heard of is students using ADHD medicines to study and concentrate. That’s hardly shooting up in the back of an alley. It is not safe, but neither is taking someone’s antibiotics because you feel sick; that’s no reason to lock them all up under tighter rules.

The law requires that all three conditions be met to be listed as a Schedule II medication, so even if you go with the whole “abuse” thing, ADD drugs should not legally be classified as Schedule II substances.

Even worse, the law specifically says that the “salts of,” among other things, amphetamine,  are to be listed as Schedule III drugs.

So, the next time you have to jump through hoops in order to get the same medicine that you have gotten every month for years, remember that it isn’t even legitimate. You are just being screwed over by a Federal Agency who put your medication on there for political reasons.

ADHD-ADD Tips — 1 Comment
24
May 10

ADHD Tip for Time Management

There are a lot of tips out there for time management, and even more time management advice. Most of it is aimed, of course, at the public at large. After all, time management is one of those things that plenty of people have trouble with whether they have ADHD or not. Like many other symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the difficulties of time management with ADD are often extreme versions of the the issues non-ADD folks have with time management. However, many of the time management tricks used by the general population can be very useful ADHD tricks for ADDers as well.

adhd-tool-timer-time-management This post will be very short because, as a follow-up post will show, I have already spent way too much time "off task" today. I haven’t been screwing around, per se, nor have I been wasting my time. Most of the tasks and functions that I have tackled this morning have value and will benefit me in one way or another. However, as is often the case with focus problems, there are other very important tasks that I should be doing right now instead. In fact, when I sat down this morning there were some "must do" tasks on my plate that have not yet found their way to my fork – metaphorically speaking.

One of these many sideline tasks that have been distracting from important tasks is re-finding, downloading, and installing an old ADHD tool that I used to have on my computer that I forgot about when I did my upgrade to a newer, faster system with Windows 7 installed.

ADHD Tools Timers

One of the tough things to swallow about all of the ADHD advice and ADD tools or tricks thrown around is their mind numbing similarity. After a while of reading about attention deficit disorder and the research being done for ADD, as well as the number self-help books and other books for ADHD, you start to see a lot of the same things mentioned over and over again. Sometimes, that is for good reason. Many of the ADHD tips given by these resources are good ones that are particularly effective. Sometimes, on the other hand, it seems that the conventional wisdom is just being repeated within the mental health community echo chamber and that all innovation in the realm of helping with ADHD symptoms has ceased.

Using a timer is one of the most common suggestions for help managing ADHD time management issues. This tip occupies both of the realms mentioned above, being both a good tip, and one so rote as to be wholly unhelpful to many people. Which is why I wanted to pop up a post about one computer-based ADHD tool that has proven helpful for me to some degree.

There is a small Windows utility called Multi-Timer 1.1 which is freeware. The guy who developed it has also written a fancier, nicer looking version, but that one is not free, and as ADHD tools go, sometimes simpler is better.

What makes Multi-Timer so useful for ADHD time management is that it shows multiple timers at once. Obviously, the ADHD mind likes to do more than one thing at a time. Sometimes this stream of multitasking works well, and other times, not so much. Either way, it is very likely that while working, an adult with ADHD will encounter another task that is just as important or more important than the one being worked on. Having multiple timers allows for the original timer to keep running (or be paused) while the timer on the next task starts.

Even more useful, this timer utility allows for both count up and count down timers to be used simultaneously. This provides the ability to both time how long something takes, as well as provide a time structure for something that should take a certain amount of time. By default, Multi-timer displays 10 timers at once and each time can be selected individually via a tab. I like to set the 5 timers on the right side to my most common count down timer periods. For example, I have 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 5 minutes, and 1 hour as my count down timers. (The last timer is the one I use for variable times like 25 minutes if I need that for some reason.)  I use the timers on the left as my count up timers, starting one for each change of task or setting as appropriate.

Ironically, some of the best ADHD help comes not from the timers themselves, but from seeing the timer application on the screen counting down (or counting up) and become embarrassed, upset, or disturbed by what is showing on the timer. This can be a stunningly effective way to refocus. Imagine that you have a writing project that  should take 30 minutes. You start a timer and hammer away. Later, you get distracted by other tasks. Eventually, you close enough windows that the timer shows through and you notice that the time spent on the task so far is 55 minutes. This can make you stop looking for that Jim Croce song you just remembered you love so much and get back to finishing the writing, because you aren’t going to let it go over 1 hour!

Try downloading the timer and see if it works for you. Often the toughest part of using it is remembering to start it up in the first place and then remembering to trigger the timers themselves. Even so, it may work just often enough to make your days more productive.

ADHD Research Studies — No Comments
11
May 10

Latest ADHD Research News Updates

A couple of interesting updates in the world of attention deficit disorder research. Of course, ADD is technically known by its formal medical name of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but people like to use both terms.

The first ADHD study comes from Spanish researchers who scanned the brains of 42 children with ADHD and 42 children without ADHD (the control group). Their results were that kids with ADHD had a smaller ventral striatum, particularly on the right side. If you are wondering, the ventral striatum includes the nucleus accumbens. That still isn’t helping, I’m sure. As it turns out the nucleus accumbens maintain a person’s level of motivation when they start a task and continues to maintain that motivation until the task is completed.

That seems to be a pretty precise understanding of brain function and anatomy, but if accurate, makes some sense. This study also gives additional weight to a hypothesis about the cause of ADHD and origin of ADD symptoms that says that attention deficit disorders are primarily caused by different brain structures or functions that impede the usual motivation and reward pathways.

This is obviously a very small study. No major conclusions can be drawn from the data presented as to ADHD’s cause or treatment of ADD symptoms. However, these small initial research studies like this one are an important step in both gaining enough scientific and medical credibility for the hypothesis that further research will be green-lighted by both government agencies and educational institutions and research facilities. They also play an important role in obtaining funding for larger research studies.

ADHD research like this recent study build the groundwork for the case that this isn’t just some wild guess about how ADD works and where ADHD comes from, but rather a sound hypothesis grounded in hard data that requires further testing. Put together with other ADD research recently that have come to similar preliminary conclusions, and this may just be the next major research path into the cause of ADHD in children and adults.

As always, great ADHD tips are available here, as well as ADD organizational tools and the elusive ADHD planner.

ADD Medication / ADHD-ADD Tips — No Comments
3
May 10

How To Take St. John's Wort For Depression With ADHD and ADD

Taking St. John’s Wort to treat mild depression that occurs with ADHD might be a helpful way to control symptoms that don’t respond as well as you would like to traditional attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medicines and therapies. As always, discuss all of your symptoms with your doctor or medical professional whether they are symptoms of attention deficit disorder or otherwise.

This posting is continued from Use St. Johns Worth For Depression with ADHD ADD

It should go without saying, but here it is anyway.

I am not a doctor. Nothing in this article or on this website should be considered medical advice. All information including dosages, medications, timing, and recommendations and warnings are for general knowledge only and is not medical advice. Consult with a physician before starting any treatment. Drug interactions can be dangerous or unpleasant. Consult a pharmacist or physician about taking any medicine, herbal remedy, or supplement.

st-johns-wort-for-depression-adhd-medicine Before anyone jumps on the, Let’s Try St John Wort to treat possible depression with attention deficit disorder Bandwagon, here are some facts you need to know.

How To Use St. John’s Wort

  1. Not all herbal medicines, natural remedies, vitamins, supplements, and pills are created equal. Time and time again, studies or investigative journalism has shown that LOTS of over the counter medicines don’t have what they say they have in them. Just because it says it on the label doesn’t make it true. My ADHD trick for getting real alternative ADD treatments in a bottle is to always buy from a company that has something to lose. That is, buy your St. John’s Wort from a respected brand that has more to lose from the bad publicity about selling a crappy product than they have to gain from cutting corners. The easiest way to use this ADHD tip is to buy your stuff at Whole Foods or Vitamin Cottage or the like. These companies build their entire business model around being “better” and “more trustworthy.” That means the suppliers know that they are out, if bad publicity threatens to drag down their brand name. If you don’t want to go that route, then buy from a well-known and respected supplement brand.
  2. St John’s Wort can be what my gal once termed, “buzzy.” That means that it can make your mind seem a little buzzed. Not in an intoxicated way, and not in a racing way, but in a crackling, seems like I can feel the electricity firing in my neurons, sort of way. What that all means is that it can make it very hard to fall asleep and stay asleep. So, start by taking your St Johns Wort in the mornings, not in the evenings until you have an idea of how it affects you.
  3. Like all depression medications, and unlike most ADHD drugs, St. John’s Wort is not an instant effect medicine. It must build up in your body, or more specifically in your brain, before it has any effect. That means you need to take it for six weeks or so before deciding if it does or does not work. It may start working sooner. However, if if seems to be working on Day 2, that just be a good day or a placebo effect. More importantly, it might be that something else is working, so don’t just attribute it to the St. Johns Wort. Instead, look around and evaluate what you are doing that is different, maybe there is something else going on that helps with your inattention or other ADD symptoms and you need to know what that is. (I have one ADD friend who is always more focused after a night of drinking, but after the hangover ends. There isn’t much you can do with that alternative ADD treatment-wise, but at least you know not to judge the effectiveness of other things on that kind of day.)
  4. Finally, get the dosage right. Remember how I said not all pills are created equal? That goes double in the supplement world of alternative herbal therapies, because there is no regulations telling manufacturers or customers what SHOULD be in the bottle. Contrast this to multivitamins where the label has to say what percentage a vitamin is of the government established recommended daily allowance. That way you know if your vitamin has the right amount of Vitamin B, for example.
  5. The right dosage for adults using St. John’s Wort for the treatment of minor depression is 300mg with 0.3% hypericins taken three times a day. Note that to get a full dosage like this without encroaching on bedtime, you’ll need to use a schedule like first thing in the morning, after breakfast, and after lunch, or something similar. Furthermore, note that you need BOTH of those numbers to be on the label. A cheapo way of making St. John’s Wort is to just throw a bunch of it in a vat regardless of quality and then make 300mg pills. The 0.3% hypercins means that the right amount of actual medicinal quality stuff is in there.
  6. Don’t just get Hypercin extract or hyperphorin, or whatever. All the best studies test the WHOLE St. John’s Wort herb, not just extracts of it. Some research suggests that while the compound called hyperforin within St. Johns Wort might be the main cause of improvement for mild depression treatment, there is also research suggesting that some of the other components inside of the herb might be important as well. If you are getting 0.3% hypercins, then you are getting all of the hyperforin already, so you might as well get the other stuff.
  7. Lastly, St. John’s Wort can interfere with other prescription drugs and medications so research the heck out of what you are taking before you start up. If you are already taking anti-depressants the DO NOT start taking St John Wort too. That is a recipe for big trouble. Also, it seems that almost everything in the world interferes with heart medications, so specifically check with  your doctor first if you are taking any heart medicine. I don’t have to tell you which is more important of the two if you want to stay alive.

That should about do it. If you want to verify (PLEASE DO) the research and medical information I have jotted down here quickly, and without any editing, start with the U.S. Nation Library of Medicine from the National Institutes of Health at PubMed.gov. Here is a link to get you started. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12543057

Yes, there is a lot of medical and scientific terminology in there, but don’t wimp out. Keep reading and you will get the gist of what is going on even if you don’t know what molarity is. The last sentence or two of the abstract is usually a conclusion, so at the very least read that. Also, always note the date of the research. It is often the case that the first study has very positive results because the first research is usually don’t as a proof of concept that more research is worthwhile. Even though the results are often reported in a splashy manner, these experiments are done on the cheap with limited controls and small groups of test subjects. Later research is typically more reliable, and when it comes to the brain, stuff from before 1980 is the mental equivalent of using leaches, so forget about research from the 1970s and before that has not been followed up significantly.

Have you tried using St. John’s Wort or other herbal medicines as alternative therapy for your ADHD or co-morbid conditions like depression? What has your experience (good or bad) been?

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