I Can't Focus, What To Do Until Possible Treatment?

[Deleted member 27340]

I'm currently in a diagnostic process where they're testing for ADHD. The process is a computer test, the T talking to my father and grandparents, a test with a physiotherapist (something about motor skills), and some questionnaires for me, my foster parents and the teachers.

I did the computer test today, and it was basically a black screen where letters in white would appear. I was supposed to press the space bar right after every single letter, except X. I pressed most the X's and missed a lot of other letters, and after the test when me and the T looked at the scores it said I was inattentive and impulsive and I had atypical results on a lot of aspects the test scored (I don't remember all, but I was atypical on the majority of them). It also said somewhere on the score that my clinical results where somewhere around 75% or so and my non-clinical results at about 20%.

Afterwards the T said the physiotherapist thing will be a month from now, and in that time she'll talk to my grandparents and my father. If the physiotherapist thing also shows ADHD symptoms, the questionnaires will be done, and I may or may not be diagnosed with ADHD.

She also said that if I do get a diagnosis, we'll have a meeting where we can talk about treatment and the possibility of getting meds.

My only problem, is that I have an issue and I can't do anything about it. The package of ADHD symptoms are things I really struggle with. I'm not self-diagnosing to that I have it, but saying that I have the symptoms and they're a problem.

If I do have ADHD and get treatment for that, it's something that will be happening at least a month from now, probably a month and a half to two months. The issue with that is that I'm in a pretty advanced and demanding high school program, and I need concentration and organisation skills and consistency now. As in before I start falling behind, not in two months.

I've always compensated with intelligence and cognitive reasoning, but the workload we have now and the demand for independent work is too big. I could have kept up to some degree, but not with good grades. When I try my best to keep up, I keep up with the knowledge but there's always piled up work. I don't have the money to self-medicate with caffeine (it works), and even if I did my foster mother would lose it completely if I used caffeine to self-medicate. Also, getting caffeine in a clean form in Norway is not possible because caffeine pills are not over-the-counter but prescribed (we also have strict restriction on the content of caffeine in energy drinks, for instance. Norway is like that).

I wonder if anyone has something I can do? Because I've tried everything, if anyone know something that can help that it not the common knowledge advices (exercise, eat healthy, listen to music, take breaks, have a calendar system, those things) that they think could help I'm grateful.

 

[Kintsugi]

Hey Ty ( :hug:!), can you elaborate on how these symptoms affect you? What you struggle with the most? That sort of thing? It may help generate more helpful responses from those who are not knowledgeable about PTSD specifically.

Is there no accomodation your teachers can give you in the meantime? My PTSD affected my college work at the darkest of times, but I was lucky enough to have professors who would really roll with the punches when it came to my crushing anxiety and disorganized work methods, which affected my ability to meet deadlines consistently. i had one professor, for instance, who would accept three papers every three weeks instead of a paper every week (I'm so weird, I know, it worked for me like that).

 

[Deleted member 27340]

I can't focus which makes me unable to do things in a logical time and sometimes even do it at all. I constantly lose track and need to re-read or do it all over again or get so frustrated I give up. And organising is really hard, I seem to forget things even if I write them down. Like homework. I write it down everywhere, I'll still forget something along with the fact that it takes me so long that I sometimes can't physically do it all (usually, actually). I struggle organising my thoughts too, I can know exactly what a topic is about and how to explain it for myself but will be unable to take notes on it and I can work on an exercise and know exactly what the answer is but be unable to write it down. It's happened on tests that I knew the answer but left it blank, or even answered something else.
And like, no matter how hard I try I can't be consistent with a routine. I plan out a schedule of school - home - little break - homework - sleep with the same times to get out and go to bed and stuff, pretty much everything you get recommended, but I can't keep up with it. I can't keep up with anything.
I don't know how to explain stuff but I don't function at all, I can't focus and work piles up and I'm an underachiever and I know caffeine is efficient for in-the-moment coping, but that's out of the picture and there's literally nothing else that works.

 

[Friday]

I wouldn't pin all your hopes on meds... The downside with stimulants, is that they do tend to also nix the very traits that get you into advanced coursework to begin with. Most ADHD kids are gifted (gifted, highly gifted, or profoundly gifted), off-med*. But stimulants alter both how fast we think & make connections (everything slows down), as well as how we think (kiss about 90% of the intuitive leaps and interconnectivity goodbye). Meds allow us to perform well in standard environments. They are incredibly blunting. If you need your edge? You aren't going to be looking for meds. You're going to be looking for coping mechanisms.

If you're ADHD, you already have coping mechanisms in spades. At this point, it will be refining the ones you already use, and adding more specific to the task at hand.

A large part of why ADHD kids tend to do so well in university is the freedom to apply coping mechanisms without parents telling you you're being ridiculous (and actively disallowing coping mechanisms -also including coffee to get through the tedious aspects), and teachers telling you they know better (and actively refusing requests, like complete syllabi, so you never have a mental map of the outline of the quarter because "it will be too overwhelming", instead I'm going to fling stuff at you with no warning which will flush your mental map too many times to count, each time losing data... Seriously, I have no idea how the f*ck neurotypical kids deal with this kind of bullshit... But maybe they never hold 3D maps in their minds but are only led along carrot to carrot. Shrug.).

ADHD coping mechanisms... There are literally thousands, although most of us end up with a couple hundred that we regularly pull from.

Good therapists (or other ADHD peeps, OMG, do it like that??? Never thought about doing that! Brilliant! And officially stolen! Bwaahahaha!) can be awesome, because they can kick coping mechanisms directly over to you, seeing that you need them... But you can also snag them from other sources, as well as intentionally experiment and tweak things in your own life, just to see what works.

* Giftedness is "just" a different way of processing and storing information. ADHD brains process & store information differently, as well... Off med. On-med, the process & storage functionality changes. It's a bit of a squares and rectangles thing. Technically, it's only ADHD-I & ADHD-C that test in the gifted ranges, but personally I include the H folks, because there are gifted athletes & musicians (etc. who work in the physical arts) who can barely sign their own name. We categorize intelligence differently. Personally, I include physical giftedness & intellectual giftedness under the same umbrella. That's mostly just me, though, and not science & academia at large. IMO, science and academia are biased towards themselves. ;) But even allowing for that bias, 2:3 subtypes usually test in the gifted range. It's part of why putting a struggling ADHD-I/C student in gifted & advanced coursework will far more often succeed that putting them in remedial coursework. Putting them in gifted-classes, however, is far more successful than putting them in advanced courses. Reason being... That different way of processing and storing information is true whether the comorbid is ADHD, Aspie, etc., or straight on the gifted spectrum. LEAPS! And then backfilling all the stuff that got missed in the leap... Is an entirely different way of teaching/learning than stolidly plodding toward... Regardless of the course content.

I looooove teaching ADHD kiddos... But our progress summaries often look incredibly erratic in the short term; generally spanning about 6 years of linear progression. But after 12mo? We're generally 3 years ahead of classmates who are on the linear track. It's another reason why universities tend to be so durn useful to ADHD kids. 400 level course work in some areas, 100 level coursework in other areas... Is exactly what this type of brain tends to do best at. Holding a student back to their lowest level? Or insisting that they perform across the board at their highest level? Is just setting them up for failure.

 

[Deleted member 27340]

Thanks @FridayJones

I'm more like that if I do have ADHD, I would at least want to try meds to see if it works for me. I've already got so many coping mechanisms down and tried so many things I'm not sure if there's anything else to try. I feel like I tried everything already. And the fact that they're just like "k now we'll take 2 months doing this thing and then we'll see if you get treatment", and when she talked about treatment she talked about other kinds of treatment than meds too. I don't feel like anything is gonna help and that everything I try is a lost call from the very beginning.

 

[Ronin]

@TyraaryT, not having advice but having questions that might help pondering: what helps you plan, what helps you stick to the plan, and what sort of planning you do for distractions?

 

[Deleted member 27340]

@FridayJones I just realised something extremely ironic and that is that last I read your post I barely got half the message, and now that I read the last paragraph only again if felt as if I never read it before. You're really informative (when I actually read properly :banghead: ) :hug: s

@Cashew I don't know, actually. I plan kinda okay, I guess. It's hard to plan but I can do it, only when I managed to plan I've got nothing left to actually stick to the plan. If I'm going to stick to it it has to be over the course of a short time period, or it won't happen. A plan that covers more than something for one day won't work, because I have literally no consistency whatsoever. I just try to get back on track when I get distracted, but it's really hard. Sometimes I even fall asleep instead of doing my work because that's easier than trying to push my mind to make an effort for more than a few minutes. If I split my work into 15 minute chunks with breaks in between, I can only do two or three chunks before I can't do more that day. This is when I work at home after school in the week, I can sometimes get more done on the weekend, but it depends. I've also never really bothered before because trying to work has always been so hard and frustrating it's been destructive, so I don't actually know exactly how I function yet. Only that I want to do well so badly and I want to learn so badly that when I find myself unable to focus I break down crying out of frustration and it pretty much ruins the tiny little bits of fractured self esteem that might've been hiding somewhere in there, and I constantly feel like a failure and literally never feel a sense of mastery (that despite skipping two grades in school, which I didn't even work for, I just did it).

 

[Chava]

A couple things that helped me in school (I don't have diagnosed ADHD but relate to many of the symptoms, just probably more from the trauma perspective of attentional issues): color-code many things, schedules, etc. Use a lot of notes. With reading, I write a lot in the margin, so I am having a "conversation" with what I am reading, vs blanking out. I also underline a lot and circle key words that jump out. Helps retain the main info (I hope you have books you can write in). Black coffee. Mozart, Bach. Exercise.

Taking a legitimate break when needed and expending energy on something very one-pointed like a walk to-and-from a certain place at a brisk pace, playing piano, doodling, whatever. Also, I still set a timer once in a while...like I will do such-and-such an activity for 15 minutes. Then switch to (something else). Then go back. It helps unlock the blur of time and mass of stuff. I was smart too, but had many troubles zooming in on what I needed to do (or the opposite, over-focusing, usually on stuff I didn't need to do). I had problems early in school and seemed to adapt through using lots of these little strategies. Prioritize homework and know what you need to work on tonight. Have a schedule or organizer and make those notes, color-code if colors help, etc.

Find a place where you can work. Total quiet never helped me. Neither did random noises, like conversations I could discern or clanging dishes. Background music or white noise was most helpful....some coffee shops, or a study space where I made a habit of just doing my work (with an outline and a timer and breaks to get up, around my timer, when needed).

Hang in there....

 

[Anarchy]

It's something I struggle with too.

Bear in mind that the proposed diagnosis of developmental trauma would encompass the diagnoses of ADD and ADHD - so many people with early trauma show up with these characteristics.

With so many of the "diagnoses" there is no hard and fast association, as there is between say for example the appearance of identifiable malaria parasites in a person's blood and the person showing the symptoms of malaria...

One of the things I would love to try is neuro feedback. I read Sebern Fisher's book, earlier in the year. http://www.bookdepository.com/Neuro...opmental-Trauma-Sebern-F-Fisher/9780393707861

She introduced van der Kolk to Neurofeedback. He describes her as calm and confident. She wasn't always that way. She's a life long friend of Marsha Linehan's, They met as young patients in a state mental asylum*...

Fisher's take (I hope I'm getting this correct, and not mis representing her) is based partly on Bowlby's attachment theory, that if things had gone as they should, connection with our mothers, it would have regulated our central nervous system.

Either that regulation never took place, [and] or it was dysregulated by trauma. Fisher suggests that neurofeedback allows brains to regulate in adulthood.

a couple of published examples of increased concentration include Inter Milan footballers and the students of the British royal college of music.

some of the seminal work on neurofeedback was done with cats [no placebo effects there!] and successfully teaching them how to resist seizures. The work was later transferred to the American space program, as exposure to the fumes of hydrazine rocket fuel was causing the early astronauts to hallucinate and have seizures.

Commercial amplifiers and software are pricey. If you stumble on any useable opensource designs and software, I'd be very interested.

@
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@Chava you posted while I've been typing, was that your take on Fisher as well?
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* I mis spelled "asylum", and one of the suggestions from my spell checker was "islam". WTF?

 

[Ronin]

@TyraaryT, as far as I know the definition of mastery was something like Doing things with elegance instrinsic to you, something no one can replicate because our ourself-ness shines through it so deep.

A.k.a. working on being the best you can be, not 'the best', by whoever else's criteria.

I know that's not something that helps much when tackling on any rigid schooling system, but it might help a little with the self value & esteem issue.

Another thing - you're overcoming so many obstacles that aren't there for multitude of other people.

You're learning all the informal, how-to-problem-solve, things while you don't get to the curriculum material.

That's not lessons of nothing; that's lessons of so much for life.

Someone who works so hard at learning? Is hardly a failure. You're a brilliant shining star that doesn't know it yet because people who admire you are on that earth dooown there.

 

[Chava]

Link Removed you posted while I've been typing, was that your take on Fisher as well?

Yes...a lot of cross-over. I think what clarifies these cases is really careful look at symptoms and then the response to treatment. Stimulants wire me and often make me more scattered. Someone with true ADHD would be helped by stimulants (sounds like OP is recognizing this). While there could certainly be cases of misdiagnosis, I know there are people here who have both PTSD and ADD/ADHD.

For me the attentional stuff has gotten better over time with increased regulation over-all, but it's a slow process. And whatever helps my physical pain, also seems to help my attention (whether movement, a subtle pain med like gabapentin)...basically simmering down the excess energy or helping relax. Then I can focus.

 

[Friday]

You're really informative (when I actually read properly :banghead: ) :hug: s

I promise, promise, promise I can actually write clearly & concisely.

Just not right now.

Been meaning to apologize for the running on jumble ^^^ there for awhile. I'm sure that's far less you're reading, and far more the fact that my PTSD symptoms are seriously f*cking with my clarity & brevity... And unfortunately, my PTSD stuff always trumps my ADHD stuff. :wtf: ((Alas, poor communication skills! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.))