Boy have I noticed a decrease in the effectiveness of Metadate CD over the past couple of weeks! I am now on 60mg per day. Instead of feeling the unchallenged alertness I had when first going on this medication, the effects of making me extremely alert are transforming into feeling dopy and slow. Now that I'm on 60mg, I feel too calm to really do anything. I make careless mistakes when walking. I'm now horribly off-balance and I'll trip over things that I normally wouldn't trip over (including myself).

When I try to read materials, I miss the overall concept of them. And when I'm trying to listen to my instructors at school, simple instructions are slipping by me. I suppose my question is, will it help any in terms of my alertness to reduce dosage? Even with 40mg per day I noticed that the alertness effects were slightly less than what they were when I first went on the medication. But I didn't feel so slow to react to things. I would think that increasing dosage would only help with alertness, not necessarily transform it into something else.

Everything I've read says that you should not increase your dosage of Metadate CD above 60mg. Therefore, I'm not going to. Has anyone else had a problem like this to where they had to reduce dosage or alternate them with Metadate CD?

If you're taking the Metadate in 20mg capsules, you might want to talk to your doctor about splitting it up. My son's doctor had him take 40 in the a.m. and another 20 at lunch. We also tried the 40mg with a Ritalin booster in the afternoon for evening activities. Once he was up to 60mg, we kept him at 40 in the a.m. and no lunch dose on weekends. As long as he wasn't in school, he seemed to do okay with that. You might also want to investigate some of the other Methylphenidate products like Ritalin and Concerta or ask about a completely different medicine. Ritalin and Concerta are very like Metadate, but release differently and could have different tolerance levels for you.

For our son, Metadate never really lasted as long as advertised and the 60mg dose ended up being problematic so we are now trying Adderall XR.

Because of Medadates nature, it is not uncommon for long time users to suffer from what seems to be that it does not work as well. Medadate is no a long acting drug meaning it works on avg. for 8 hours and then is done (some people as short as 6 hours). Insteading of upping your dose you should do what was stated above and think about taking it at more frequent intervals at smaller doses say like 20 mg ever 6 hours to 8 hours. I take one in the morning and one in the afternoon and it is working well. I am new to taking this drug but so far it works very well.