Posted by Alsace on August 5, 2003, at 23:24:04
All my life I've been very easy going, never anxious, depressed, or too stressed out. I had problems with procrastinating and keeping my attention on school tasks, so finally at age 21 I went to my doctor and he gave me Concerta. It didn't seem to work well, and by the time I got up to 52mg (the third dosage stage) I began to have anxiety, so I stopped for about a week and quickly felt better.
I then started Adderall XR at 10mg. This worked wonderfully for me, in terms of being effective on my attention and not having side effects. A few months later I took five days off while I was on vacation. On my second day back on Adderall, I had very fast palpitations and, not knowing what was happening, went to the ER; after this I quit Adderall cold turkey. I was okay and went home, but had some chest pains and anxiety until my doctor did some tests and found out my heart and thyroid were perfectly healthy. That relieved the pains and a lot of the anxiety.
It's been four weeks and I'm still feeling small periods of anxiety throughout the day. My doc gave me Effexor XR, but I decided to wait until after my vacation (starting the next day) before I'd start on it. I felt fantastic during vacation, but now I'm back to the anxiety.
I'm leary of starting another drug. Has the Adderall permanently affected me? Is the anxiety just something that I'm subconciously associating with home/work and I can force it to go away? If I restarted Adderall, would I suffer the same (or worse) withdrawal when I eventually stop using it?
poster:Alsace
thread:248458
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030711/msgs/248458.html