Hi all! I'm a 22 year old college student and was diagnosed a couple weeks ago. I have been "experimenting" with medications (under a doctors supervision of course). The first week the MD tried me on Ritalin and Dextroamphetamine. I noticed a little more effect with the dexedrine. Then the next week he had me compare dexedrine and adderall. Here's what I found:

Ritalin seemed to work OK (i went up to 20mg), but I got really irritable after about 4 hours. I don' tknow if this was related to the Ritalin, but I didn't like that feeling.

The dexedrine works pretty well (i'm currently at 15 mg before breakfast and lunch, and sometimes 10 in the evening if I need to get a lot done that night). Adderall was different. I felt a little bit at 10mg a half hour before breakfast, and the next day I took 20 right after a big meal. I didn't feel it work at all. Does food affect other people on adderall? My doc told me to try 20 on an empty stomach tomorrow, and possibly try 30. I only have 5 tablets left, so I better make this count! :)

I guess my question is this: what did you feel while you were on the meds? I'm not noticing a night and day difference. The biggest difference I notice is that I don' tneed to struggle to stay awake through classes, so obviously, this would help anyone's attention span. :) I feel kind of caffeinated mentally, but don't have the jitters that caffeine would give me. I can kind of describe my reaction to meds as an increased awareness, and things seem less chaotic inside my head.

Does this sound like a decent medication response? Thanks!!

Well, at first I got insomnia and nausea, but that evened out back to pre-dex, and mentally, it's like that old has-been phrase about "Coming Out of a Fog." Suddenly I could understand and analyze things--I always had a really bad memory, and got confused easily--and remembered complicated details for a long time.

Now I've kind of gone overboard--I think my doc said I'm hyperfocusing, and a lot of adults do that when they've lived their whole lives working sooo hard to think and then suddenly, "whoosh," this improvement, and begin to overanalyze everything...doing assignments and there's a simple answer that's so obvious, but I just overlook that and do way more work than I have to, then spend way more time writing/editing assignments than I have to--and in the end, it's not even that organized, just a jumbled bunch of facts built up in my brain that sort of got dumped into a paper that might be 15 pages when it should've only been 5!

But I'm straightening that out, too.

Basically my response was an extremely intense improvement in cognition and memory retention. I'm an extreme case, though--I have brain damage in addition, so some stuff will never totally improve, but this is just amazing. (It'll be even better when I get done with this overanalyzing neurotic thing! Annoying, yes, but I'll work past it, and it's very nice to feel smarter after 23 years of feeling like an absentminded airhead.)

Dex is why I joined this forum. I started out on 5 mg spansules, got some advice from people on here (I was scared at first--I mean, I'd never been on amphetamines, though I'd been on just about everything else), it helped. Right now I'm on 30 mg. (Once a day.)