Jane McFadden:
Welcome to another episode of ADHD Mums. Today you have me solo and the reason being is because I want to really start to unpack a common theme in the DMs that I get. My medication and psychiatrist episode that was me talking about my experience and all the different pathways, how much it costs, how that’s worked for me personally, still is one of the highest rated episodes.

If you haven’t listened to that, absolutely go back. It’s going to be giving us the why, my why as to why I changed my mind. Initially when I got diagnosed, I was not pro-medication and now I am.

How did that happen? What changed? What research did I read and how did I come to that conclusion? That is what we are going to talk about here today. We’re going to talk about what are the ADHD medications. One of the most common questions I have asked is why get a diagnosis? Well, if you have ADHD, you might like to try some medication.

That for me would be a really great reason why. What is amphetamine? Why do all the drugs finish with the word amphetamine? Is this speed? How does that work? Is it addictive? We should give speed to our kids. What? All of these questions answered.

What are the long-term consequences? What is the difference between childhood and adult ADHD? When should medication be used? How should it be used? Why are some medications for ADHD used recreationally? Why? Will my child not grow? Will they be short? Will they not eat any food again? How can I counteract that? What about the crash? How do I know if it’s working? All of these questions we are going to get to today.

First off, I’m going to give a very small share about the why. For me, my background is mental health. My husband’s background is physical health. We really love health, clearly. That’s a shared passion of ours.

We are generally not people that go to medication straight away. We don’t line up for antibiotics straight away. We don’t take Panadol straight away.

I’m not somebody that would try a medication without really thinking about it or take many medications at all. My history as a teenager, I was given very heavy antidepressants. For me to medicate for mental health reasons, I do get quite upset or emotional thinking about medicating one of my children because I was medicated as a child and I didn’t get good outcomes.

I didn’t get any outcomes. I think I got bad outcomes. That was with an SSRI drug.

For me, with an ADHD brain, I was given some pretty heavy antidepressants that weren’t working and they just kept turning them up. Then you get a lot of side effects. You can imagine how that feel as a child.

Also, I got a really strong message that there’s something really wrong with me because I’m taking a lot of medication and I’m getting a lot of help and I’m not getting better. For me, that was a really hard thing to go through, to be medicated with something that wasn’t working and just continue to give it. The reason I share this is because I want you to know that I am not somebody that medicates easily, quickly without thinking about it.

When I was diagnosed in 2021 at the start of the year by my psychologist that was treating me and he came out of nowhere and said, I think you have ADHD. Probably not out of nowhere for him, but it was out of nowhere for me. I’d been in treatment for mental health for probably nearly 20 years off and on, burnout, stress, depression, anxiety.

I hadn’t taken any medication since I was a teenager. I wasn’t medicated, but I was just trying to figure out why am I so overwhelmed? Why am I so anxious? Why am I so stressed out? Why can’t do tasks like everybody else? Why am I getting so angry and impatient? I couldn’t figure it out. I looked on social media with all these present mums that are having cups of tea, watching the kids play.

I was like, I can’t do that. I’ve got no reference point. That’s not who I am.

Is there something wrong with me? Which, wow, when you’re not diagnosed as a child, you do for me anyway, spend about 20, 30, however many years it takes questioning what’s wrong with me? Is there something inherently wrong with me? Turns out there’s nothing wrong with me, but my brain works differently. For me, that knowledge has been super important. When I found out in 2021, my husband firstly was not open to medication.

He’s like, I don’t want you to just take a pill. I completely agreed with him. For that year, I did a lot of lifestyle changes.

A psychologist recommended a lot of movement. I’m very cognitively hyperactive, hyperactive in my brain, impulsive, lots of decisions, lots of excitement, lots of energy. I’d get burnout and exhausted.

Then I’d be snappy at the end of the day because I haven’t had any lunch, any chance for self-care. I would just go, go, go, take on too many projects. I started surfing in the morning, going to the gym in the morning.

Sometimes I’d do three or four hours of exercise. I went all out. Let me tell you, when I finished that exercise, it was not enough.

I was actually worse than ever because then I felt like I just wasted all this time doing all this exercise when it was getting in the way of all the projects that I was doing. It got even worse, like in terms of impatient, angry. I was thinking this just isn’t working.

My husband would say, my eyes would be darting all over the room and I’d be stressing. He’d try to talk to me. I wouldn’t even be present because my head was filled with heavy music.

Then of course, when a child talks to you, I ask you for something simple. You’re like, I can’t get you a glass of juice. I’m thinking about all of these things.

I’m so stressed out. What about me? Those would become some of the things that I was dealing with. We ended up going away on a caravan trip.

Me with my impulsive brain decided to go away for a whole year on a caravan trip, having never been in a caravan before. We bought one in 12 hours. We left a month later, like it was mayhem.

We went away with me being diagnosed with ADHD, but having had no time, energy, because I worked on the road as well, to actually start to pull this apart. I had three children that had ADHD that were undiagnosed and had no idea. You can imagine the mayhem in such a small space with so many people yelling, crying, talking, not a lot of regulation, all in one tiny caravan.

We came back nearly a year later. We didn’t last a whole year, but we came back nearly a year later. That was when I started to seek help.

I thought, I actually don’t feel okay. You know what else? I was really burnt out from the trip. The trip was exhausting.

I came back into my normal life and thought, this is sweet relief. Just working and having the school run is sweet relief to what I was dealing with on the caravan trip. There was no privacy.

There was no moments. We talk about having no moments in a house. Trust me, there was no moments in a caravan trip, especially because my kids didn’t really play that well with others.

I had to monitor them constantly. I had one that wanted to fight all the time. He wanted to fight other kids.

It wasn’t something where they ran off and then I sat and read a book. If I had any moments, I’d be standing in the hot sun trying to find a reception to make phone calls for work. There was a lot of anxiety about being away and how that was all working.

Anyway, so I come back and I get diagnosed by a psychiatrist. I did that through a telehealth service, which I fully document in my episode, Medication and Psychiatrists. When I took that medication for the first time, it was incredible.

Again, documented on the Medication and Psychiatrists episode, so please go ahead if you want to know more about how that felt and what changed for me, that is in that episode. It was at that moment when I took the first medication that I thought, well, this is the start of my actual life. This is actually my best days coming.

I can’t believe the difference. I could go on and on and on about it, but I won’t because you could listen to it in the other episode. For me, it’s been a big journey.

My husband was not very pro-medication for a long time. When we went to the pediatrician finally after two years of waiting, and we already had a diagnosis through a clinical psychologist. We’d already spent two grand each kid.

Then we turned up for a $600 pediatrician appointment. I was open to medication at that point because I thought, well, why else am I here? I already have the diagnosis. We’ve already got the supports in place.

We’ve got the NDIS plans. Why am I at the pediatrician for medication? She actually spoke to me and my husband about a child’s brain and why you medicate, which was different to what I really thought in my mind. That was when it tweaked this interest of what does medication do to the brain? How does it change things? What am I missing with my kids? Am I not giving them the gift of medication? Do they need it? Both of them struggling at school.

And both of them are coming up quite high in terms of intellect, but below average marks. There was talk of my son having dyslexia. My daughter, very much in meeting me, was having symptoms like anxiety, stress.

She was getting very burnt out because for her, she has to try so much harder to listen. She has to try so much harder to get the work complete. The homework takes so much longer.

She was always feeling this, trying to catch up, trying to keep up. I looked at her and thought, am I letting her struggle? Am I letting her swim without a life raft kind of thing? What would change for her? The great thing about medication is it happens and works so quickly. You’re able to give some medication, and I’ve tried all of them, so has my husband.

We already knew the one that worked for us, which was the dexamphetamine long-acting Vyvanse, which we thought if it works for both of us, it probably will work for our kids. We didn’t have great results on Ritalin. We gave the Vyvanse to my daughter, and the first day, my husband was blown away with the results, blown away with how happy she is, how relaxed, how more flexible she is, how she can go and make her bed, put her things in a bag, get in the car when asked.

We would spend 90 minutes just begging her. My husband’s a personal trainer, and he would always talk about clients that he had to motivate for every rep. Every single time they did a squat or any kind of weight, it was like, go, next one, you can do it, you can do it, next one, you can do it.

He would say, oh, it’s so painful to have to motivate somebody to do every single movement. You’re basically doing it for them. It’s like body doubling.

That was what my daughter was like to get ready in the morning. It was that painful to stand over her and go, come on. Then as soon as you start asking her to move a bit quicker, she would then become very upset.

The emotional regulation was out. So the first day that we had this medication, she was a different child, and she was so much more patient with her brothers. I noticed as well, they can be quite annoying.

She’s got two little brothers, and she was so much more patient with them. Oh, would you like a turn? Okay. Instead of flying off the handle, she used to walk past one of her brothers, and she’d be like, he hit me.

It was like, he didn’t even touch her, or maybe he brushed her accidentally as he walked past, or there’s always fighting over the couch. Who’s on the couch? Who’s touching who? What blanket are you using? Flying off the handle, and then she’d refuse to apologize until he moved his legs first. He wouldn’t move his legs until she apologized, and it would just be a circus.

So those types of things were really difficult, and I felt there was a lot less anxiety. There was a lot less of the meltdown at nighttime. I’m so nervous about this tomorrow.

I don’t want to do that tomorrow. A lot less RSD as well. So before, she’d be like, well, this girl said this to me, and I’d get a call from a teacher, and the teacher would be like, she’s unable to learn.

She’s non-responsive. She’s sitting there. She has cracked it.

I don’t know what it is about, and it would generally be about something another child had done to her a few days earlier. The school were great. They would actually go in and mediate it between the two girls, but what actually happened is often the other girl did not have an understanding that there was an issue.

So it was so small and so blown up. She thought it was this issue that it actually was not. So for her, it’s been amazing.

Also, I felt like she binge-eated a lot before she was medicated. I would find her in a walk-in row with a whole packet of Oreos all the time, and I was concerned, one, that wasn’t healthy intake of food, and two, that she would end up an unhealthy weight, or that she would actually grow into an adult that binge-eats as a pastime, and I was thinking, oh, my goodness. I feel like the women that I’ve spoken to that binge-eat as adults, they generally would say to me that they remember doing that as kids, and I just felt like I need to do something, and I found that medication.

She has lost weight, but I think she’s in the healthy weight range, and it stopped the binging that she used to do. She more has a healthy intake of food. She makes better choices, and she’s less mindlessly eating, and she’s more happy.

So she’s not sitting in a walk-in row with packets of Oreos of an afternoon every day anymore. So whilst I talk about my children on a particular medication, I don’t want you to think that that’s the medication that you should go and ask for. Often, it can take four to five medications to find one that works.

I would absolutely recommend doing your research and finding a paediatrician that you trust, because as a parent, I don’t know anybody who’s ever looked forward to or wanted to medicate a child at a young age. Not one parent I’ve spoken to wants to do it. There’s so much trust and a leap of faith filling a script and giving a substance to your child.

That feeling, for me, I found it horrible. Yes, there’s hope. It’s mixed feelings, but it was difficult, really difficult.

No parent I’ve spoken to has liked that process. Finding out that that’s not the right medication and having to restart, horrible. Often, with medications, you need to try more than one.

If you have children that have mixed neurodiversity with multiple diagnosis, ADHD with autism or trauma, absolutely go to your paediatrician and go with what they say. I’m just talking about the benefits of medicating overall. I’m not saying that one medication fits all with ADHD and that’s what you should ask for.

Sometimes, with ADHD medications like Ritalin, Vyvanse, and the ones that we’re going to speak about in this episode, those stimulant medications can actually unveil and really bring out autistic tendencies if there are some below the surface. If you’re talking Vyvanse and your child also is autistic, your paediatrician will let you know that sometimes that can make them a bit more withdrawn, a bit more down. Always go back with your child, what specifically they need, what age they are, and go with that.

I would never recommend anybody following what I’m saying about Vyvanse. Just because it works for me doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you or your children. Always go back to your medical advice.

This episode is about the benefits of medication, not about specifically using one medication. Shortly after we saw these benefits with my daughter, my son, Gus, he is a bit of a dynamite and he’s a real antagonist. If you’re thinking, oh, what’s an antagonist? What an antagonist does is they seek dopamine by stirring others up.

You know that kid that stirs the pot? Yeah, I’ve got one of those. For some reason, it seems to be the middle kid that does it and he stirs for fun. Someone will be watching a movie, he’ll walk past, turn off the TV, that kind of thing.

You can imagine the blowups constantly and he would do that as a pastime. For example, he could be quite negative with my littler boy and he would be quite negative with my daughter. Let’s say as an example, maybe my daughter is singing, she loves to sing, and he would say, stop singing, stop singing, I hate it, you’re singing, you’re hurting my ears.

It would be like, honestly, she’d be like whisper singing so quietly, not impacting anybody and he would be a mental case. Then she’d be like, he’s yelling and I can’t stop singing. It would be this whole thing.

The other day, he just said to her, oh, you’re a really good singer, Gigi. I was like, oh my God, who is this child? He is much more flexible. For example, my littlest son, who’s unmedicated and he’s a bit of a dynamite, he has a real problem with other people doing things that he can do himself.

My middle son, Gus, would go and open a door for him. He would jump in and do things for him. If I could imagine something that would aggravate my little boy more, it’s something being done for him that he could do himself.

My middle son would spend most of his day doing things for him to upset him. He doesn’t do that anymore. Even if I actually say to him, Gus, stop, Billy wants to undo the gate, Gus, he can actually stop.

He’s life-changing for our house. For an example, yesterday was Sunday and you generally go to the beach. The first week of medication, we took Gus to the beach.

It’s the first time we’ve ever had a time as a family at the beach. I know that sounds horrible, but I’m sure people on this podcast would understand what I’m talking about. The beach is actually really difficult to have a good time.

It’s hot. There’s sensory stuff. There’s water, so there’s danger.

There’s always some people with their dogs. The dogs want to run over. There’s always stuff going on.

Everyone wants to swim at once. Maybe I jump in the water, everyone wants to get in with me. It’s a whole thing.

Who’s got my bucket? Who’s got my spade? Then they throw sand at each other. Maybe there’s jellyfish. It’s always a nightmare.

We still go because I actually love it. I love being at the beach. It’s just the company that I’m with is a bit dodgy.

We went to the beach last Sunday. Best time we’ve ever had at the beach. I actually felt quite relaxed.

Gigi and Gus both medicated. Billy was himself, but I only had one that couldn’t regulate and one that didn’t listen to direction great and one that stirred the others up. Gus and Gigi were actually great.

Gus actually focused on building the sand castle and he kept to himself. He didn’t even go over and wreck anyone else’s stuff. It was pretty great.

Yesterday was Sunday again. I had it in my head, maybe he needs a medication break because I’d heard that you can build up tolerance. We decided to give him a break.

Also, if I’m honest, we got up really late and I was like, do I want to give it to him at 9 AM? Went to the beach. It was horrific. Went to the pool.

He was horrific. If I go in the pool with unmedicated Gus, I can’t even tell you. I just want to get a passport.

I want to drive to an international airport and I want to get on the plane. He screams. He’s in my face.

He’s so intense. I call him like a kelpie puppy with the level of intensity. He’s right up in your face.

Everything’s yelling. He can’t talk. He has to yell.

If you throw in a sinky for any of the other kids, he would get it first. He can’t wait. Even if you tell him, these are the blue ones.

These are yours. He would just get other people’s sinkies and just irritate everybody. Honestly, he can be really irritating.

Socially, he can be a handful because often when the teams are picked at school, people don’t want to pick him. He’s a terrible sport. He hates to lose.

There’s been a lot of changes here. Obviously, taking him to the beach medicated, taking him to the beach unmedicated, different thing. Taking him in the pool, he will just get his own sinkies, bring them back and wait.

He will go down the slide nicely without having to push anybody down or throw anybody off or yell in my face. He just talks like his volume is less. He just seems more relaxed.

If we were to play a game of cards, for example, unmedicated Gus can’t make his turn. He starts yelling at people, accusing people of cheating. Then he starts cheating himself.

If he loses, he goes insane. He is really difficult to cards with. If Gigi and Gus are playing together unmedicated, it is the most draining experience of my life.

They both scream, pick fights, physically hit each other. You can’t stop the game because then they go even more psycho and you just want it to end. But medicated Gigi and Gus actually taught them how to play rat-a-tat-tat the other day.

They sat and waited and asked questions and were actually okay when the other person won. I just couldn’t believe it. To be honest, it made my youngest son Billy look even more off-show as normal because I was like, wow, these two are pretty relaxed.

Don’t get me wrong. These kids are not drugged out. They’re still energetic.

They’re still hilarious. They’re both quirky completely themselves. Same interests.

They’re not sitting on the couch staring at the wall like a lot of people say medicated children is drugging them out and stuff. Not like that at all. They’re basically just less impulsive, better emotional regulation, more able to take direction and listen, less argumentative with each other, more positive in their wording.

They actually said they loved each other the other day, which I’ve never heard them say before. Literally these kids, I hate saying it, but they kind of hate each other. A lot of people on the podcast have been letting me know that if I medicated my boys particularly, that would be different.

I had it in my head that we weren’t going to do that until it was really necessary. My child has to be struggling at school, hitting people or destructive. I’m not going to do it just to make them learn a bit better.

They don’t really need it. That was my thought pattern. That has all changed.

The benefits that I’ve seen with Gus is more positive, less destructive, more able to focus on a task. For example, if I set him up with Lego and go off to have a shower, he’ll still be doing it when I get back. He won’t have walked off, thrown it at the wall and then started a fire.

Like this morning, I gave him the car keys and I asked him to unlock the car and go put his bags in and then sit in the car and wait for me to come out, drive him to school. I came out there, he was there in the car waiting. I was like, oh my God, who is this kid? Because usually he would have got distracted, lost the keys in the garden or gone down the road on his bike with a friend, put the keys in his pocket.

Possibly they’ve fallen out. I’d be on the gutter trying to find them. Or if I’m honest, I probably wouldn’t even give him that job because you can’t let him out of your sight because he would turn on the hose and decide to start a water fight with Billy.

Then everyone would be wet and I have to get them back changed. He really needed a lot of one-to-one as did Gigi to get ready. So the drain of the morning is definitely not there.

Anyway, I really want to continue on about the research and I wanted to do the positive. I wanted to do the personal share because I wanted to make sure that people could hear a real story. This is a relatable life story.

This isn’t just research and I don’t want it to be classed as that, but I do want to go over some of those questions that people have and I had and some of those myths around medicating with children. Again, I’m not a medication specialist. I am not a pediatrician.

I’m not a psychiatrist. So this is just a lived experience. Always go seek your own advice.

First off, I want to credit Dr. Huberman. He’s an American psychiatrist. I also want to credit Dr. Daniel Armen.

He’s a doctor. He’s a psychiatrist. He’s a brain disorder specialist.

He’s a director of the Armen Clinics. I researched a lot of his work and some of what I’m going to talk about today is based off some of his work. So I’m really going to bring a lot of this research from him and Dr. Armen down into more of a relatable Aussie mum level.

I absolutely want to credit those two and if you want to jump over and you do want to hear more of the science, more of the detail, absolutely that’s there for you. So let’s talk about the treatments for ADHD and why a stimulant in particular is so effective. First of all, we all know that ADHD affects attention.

Now attention is one thing, but what it actually involves is suppressing the noise that is the background chatter in our heads, turning down noise, visual cues, sounds, conversations in our head that are not relevant. It involves ramping up things that are relevant, what we actually want to focus on, allowing our brain to focus and turning everything else down. A lot of people with ADHD will say that they feel really tired.

Now why that is, is because your brain is working so much harder to focus. It’s working so much harder on figuring out what to do next, what to focus on and shutting down all of that chatter. People talk about running a mental marathon when they’re trying to learn.

That is basically what it’s like for a brain that doesn’t have any medication that is an ADHD brain. So Dr Huberman talks a particular place in the brain called the prefrontal cortex that is the part that needs to talk to the other brain areas in the right ways. What happens with the brain in a person with ADHD is that there is a lot of background chatter that is very, very loud.

So what we know is that that is sitting there even whilst the child or the adult is trying to do things. So if someone with ADHD sits down and tries to do some book work or some admin or their tax or something, their internal brain will start to distract them. So there is various drugs that help allow the prefrontal cortex to be a better conductor.

So that’s a music conductor in like an orchestra. Now, if you do that early enough, you can actually teach the prefrontal cortex of a young child how to operate better or how to operate at more of a neurotypical level or at least improve the function that they’re at. These sort of circuits create a learning to make it more efficient.

So let’s go back to the main question, which is why would amphetamine or stimulants improve the symptoms of ADHD? If you think about the prefrontal cortex, it needs to be able to coordinate the actions of the other circuits in the brain. So the prefrontal cortex needs to be flexible. It needs to pay attention to this.

It needs to adapt. It needs to come back to this. It needs to take a phone call and then come back to what it needs to do.

It needs to be adaptive. So let’s talk first around Adderall. Some of the side effects can be increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, sweating, etc.

Many of you are probably familiar with Vyvanse, and that actually is an extended release Adderall. So one of the major effects of Adderall is that it increases the activities of two neurochemicals. One is dopamine, no surprise.

The next chemical that’s affected is norepinephrine. The main effect of Adderall is to increase the transmission of dopamine and norepinephrine. Dopamine is no surprise.

We understand that, but let’s just go over it because it’s interesting to hear the science behind it, not just, we don’t have enough dopamine, we need to get dopamine. So if we would just look at dopamine, we would find that dopamine is released at sites within the brain. It increases the activity in the brain work, and it increases motivational pursuits and mood.

If we looked at norepinephrine and when it’s released, but not at the same sites. When dopamine is released, and the main function of norepinephrine is to increase the activity of the neural networks. Think about dopamine and norepinephrine as collaborators, because that’s what they are.

And they’re also very similar. They’re kind of like cousins that work together to achieve a common goal, which is motivation, focus and alertness. So when we talk about attention in ADHD, what we’re talking about is quietening the hyperactivity or the impulsivity of ADHD.

And one of the reasons that the drug is effective in treating ADHD is because it increases motivation, focus and alertness. And that’s what it does in the brain. Vyvanse can increase dopamine to such a great extent, especially compared to other treatments of ADHD, because of its ability to increase dopamine release and transmission.

It is a pretty attractive drug for people with ADHD. A lot of think Vyvanse is a slow-release Adderall. It is not.

That is not what Vyvanse is. It is the amphetamine only, but it is an in-time release form. And Vyvanse was actually developed as a way to try and get around or prevent some of the abuse potential of Adderall.

Vyvanse is actually a time-release dexedrine. There’s been a lot of movies and reports about dexedrine and, you know, like crime and drug dealing, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not an effective and useful pharmaceutical. Vyvanse and time-release dexedrine is proved to be one of the most effective forms of treating ADHD in a lot of people.

I take it, my kids take it. When someone takes Vyvanse, and of course, we would hope that that’s being taken responsibly with a prescription to the right dose, they’re getting a very slow trickle of dexedrine into their system. And it’s a slow, long-lasting increase in dopamine and norepinephrine.

The effects of Vyvanse can extend from 12 to 16 or even 18 hours, depending on how the person metabolizes it. There’s really no way to predict how you are going to react to any of these drugs except by trying it. You don’t know if you’re going to be a fast metabolizer or a slow metabolizer, but what you do know is that it’s only going to last that time period, as opposed to, you know, an SSRI where you need to take it for, you know, possibly 10, 12 weeks and then see how you feel, build it up in your system.

That’s not like that with these drugs. So when someone wants to try one of these drugs, they will know pretty quickly what the effect for them is. If you are a fast metabolizer, you may find that you will get a slump in the afternoon from Vyvanse.

And depending on how you feel and, you know, what type of job you’re in and how important the afternoon is, you know, some people will take a top-up dexamphetamine at that point. I have done that, try not to do all the time, but I have done that. And I understand that sometimes for people who are fast metabolizers, that’s what they need to do.

Some people find that taking a Vyvanse at 6am will have them all going all day long and all day night. And that’s just too much stimulation, and they need to have that reduced. If you’re one of those people, you might have been having too much.

But again, that’s something for you to talk to your doctor about. The other drug that a lot of people talk about is Ritalin. And then there’s Concertil, which is the long-acting Ritalin.

Ritalin is the most, kind of, commonly prescribed drug that most people know about. And it’s more related to that stigma presentation of that, you know, child that’s hitting people in class, they’re disruptive, and they’re running away, and they can’t sit on the mat, and then they’re given Ritalin. And that’s kind of like a naughty boy stigma, kind of, of ADHD, which we know is not correct.

But I’m saying people do know what Ritalin is. A lot of people are wondering, well, what are the long-term consequences of Ritalin? Ritalin isn’t as popular these days. A lot more people, kind of, take Vyvanse and dexamphetamine.

But sometimes, like my psychiatrist, which I talk about in the Medication Psychiatrist episode, you know, refused to give me Vyvanse or dexamphetamine. He made me start with Ritalin. And I think there’s always that danger of not knowing that there’s anything else, and then you’ve got to pay to go back to ask for something else.

I think it’s a to do with the Medicare system and how that works. A lot of people think that Ritalin is really a short-acting kind of like dexamphetamine. That’s not the case.

Ritalin does tend to kick in quicker and then finish quicker. And a lot of people, in personal opinion, do tend to tell me there’s a rise up and then a strong down. I certainly found that myself.

And, you know, Ritalin works in a different way in the brain, which I’m not going to go over and explain how the brain functions, how it works. I think if that’s the level of detail that you need, I would absolutely recommend going over to Dr. Haberman’s podcast himself or his YouTube videos. So here’s a question that people ask.

Well, what would happen if you take this drug and you don’t have ADHD? A lot of people still feel like imposters, even with a prescription. We know that if dopamine is increased too much in the brain of someone that has ADHD or if someone doesn’t actually have ADHD and they were to take one of these drugs, they can become a little euphoric. They can become a little manic, a little psychotic.

People can become anxious, have panic attacks. They can have an elevated heart rate. They can be sweating.

They can be teeth grinding. And then there’s that question of, oh, well, how would that calm a child down? How would that calm an adult down with ADHD? As a general rule, children and adults with ADHD are very capable of having periods of focus. They have a harder time getting to the period of focus and a hard time getting to the state.

But when they’re in the state, they can actually focus, especially if it’s an area of interest. But getting a child to start on a task that they are not interested in can be really difficult and getting them to stick to it, very difficult. So we really need the right balance here.

Really, I think the key message here is that we are allowing the prefrontal cortex to be more of a coordinator in the orchestra. To work in a proper way, the conductor needs to activate instruments in the band in the appropriate order to arrive with the right music. You don’t just play all the instruments at once, which would just be complete noise.

You have to play them at certain times to make the right music. It doesn’t matter how great a musician you have in your orchestra or in your band. If they’re not playing at the right times, the music is not going to sound very good.

And that’s what the prefrontal cortex can do better for kids and for adults with ADHD. So when you’re giving a child medication, you will find that they are able to function better because the prefrontal cortex is able to function with what it needs to do next. Those automatic processes that a neurotypical brain has on what to do, what comes next, achieve the task, this is what I do next.

ADHD children don’t necessarily have that. What the medication does is allows them to have the prefrontal cortex working properly. So they are no longer going, got to get my shoes on, got to get my shoes on.

Where are my shoes? Oh, there’s a bird. I wonder if I should feed the cat. They just go and put their shoes on.

And that’s been a real life changing moment for me to actually watch that happen in real time. One of the most important things and the biggest thing that I have learned, the biggest takeaway that I want you to have is that in the brain there is neuroplasticity. So the nervous system’s ability to change in response to experience.

So remember that when dopamine and norepinephrine are increased, there is a higher probability of strengthening the connections in the brain. That means that later, even if dopamine and norepinephrine are not increased, they can go back to a baseline and that baseline can change. And this is where it gets really interesting because it’s likely that the connections that where they took place are strengthened and more easily activated.

This brings us back to why we medicate children. And this is because the brain is able to change. We can get the brain to work better.

I am hoping that by medicating my children from an earlier age, they are going to be better off and have better brain functionings than what I do at 37 years old. This means that this could strengthen the network and it could function better later on, even after you finish taking the drug. This is a crucial point that is just not discussed enough.

So when people say, should I put my child in ADHD medication? Oh, I don’t think they really need it. Oh, maybe I should take my child off ADHD medication in their adolescence and then, you know, let them go to university without it because they need to start to learn to cope. But no one wants to achieve benefits with a drug early on and then just lose the benefits later.

No child or parent wants to take a drug that they don’t need either. No one really wants to medicate their children. I certainly don’t want to, but I will if the benefits are there.

If your child is able to get a script from a qualified psychiatrist or pediatrician, then there is a reason for them to take it. So you don’t need to stand there with your script and your bottle and then wonder whether you’re doing the right thing because a qualified professional has given you the tablets. What I think is important is the dosage level.

If they’re going to medicate, they want to medicate at the lowest level. No one wants to give their child more than what they need. And that’s when it’s really up to us watching the results.

You might find that your child doesn’t need that much. And if they’re not having a good result, you might have a fast metabolism child that doesn’t have enough, or you might have a child that, you know, it’s too much and they are not feeling good. My daughter will, for example, say to me, I don’t want to have no thoughts in my brain.

I don’t want to have lots, so I just want to have some. And I know if she’s had too much, when we’re trying to get the dose right, she would say, I don’t have anything in my mind and I don’t like it. Or I tried to do some work, I couldn’t think of anything.

So she wants to have just the right amount of thoughts, not too many, but not too little. She came up with that herself. So what we do know about the research, and this is directly from Dr. Huberman, is that children that have ADHD, they’re diagnosed with ADHD and they are treated with the right drugs and dosages, they do get a better result.

They have a better outcome, both in childhood and for later in life and performance in school. A lot of people wonder and worry about whether to treat or not treat early in life, and whether their child will become addicted. Is it a gateway drug? Will they then become a drug addict? Will they end up in prison? Some people honestly think that people that take ADHD medication are more likely to end up in prison.

Actually, it’s an unmedicated, undiagnosed ADHD person that’s incredibly impulsive that’s more likely to end up in prison. Actually, kids with ADHD have got great outcomes. And we know that without the right treatment, yes, they do have more tendency towards illicit drug use and addictive drug potential in their adulthood.

There is, in my opinion, a risk with not diagnosing or medicating a child with ADHD during childhood. A lot of women come on this podcast and they’ll list dangerous things that they’ve done. I’ve listed some decisions that they’ve made and things that they look back and go, how am I still alive? How did I get out of that? Or, you know, putting themselves in situations of risk because of, you know, not thinking things through.

And some women have got a lot of trauma because of those decisions that they’ve made that when they look back, they think, oh, I can’t believe I did that. So if you do have children who are very impulsive and following all of their impulses in early adolescence, adolescence and early 20s, that would be something I’d want to watch pretty carefully. I think a lot of the decisions that I’ve made in my life and regretted, it’s not about what I haven’t done.

It’s more about what I have done that I shouldn’t have. What I did say that I shouldn’t have. And some of that’s really impulsive decision-making that I wish I could come back to.

I haven’t even been medicated a full year. So there’s still decisions that I have made in the past that are impacting me today, like, you know, a non-refundable holiday that I’ve booked at Sea World right in the middle of school holidays. I don’t want to do that.

It’s going to be too busy. I won’t cope. The kids won’t cope.

So I’m trying to move dates and make decisions that are better decisions because I would have gone on that holiday and then wondered why I had such an awful time. One thing that we also do know that any child, adolescent or person that’s younger than 25 that has taken ADHD medication that has ADHD, no doubt has achieved some neuroplasticity in their brain. They have no doubt improved their brain function.

They have no doubt got a better conductor than what they had in the beginning. These circuits in their brain will get stronger and are more likely to function better without medication in the future. A lot of people will say that you can taper off ADHD medication prior to 25.

If you were to take a child or an adolescent off these drugs very quickly, it would abruptly cease increasing the dopamine and the norepinephrine. That then can create lethargy, depressed mood, not feeling good, anxiety, anger, irritation. Just a word of warning, if you to take your child off quickly or go off drugs quickly yourself, and we know with the shortage that can happen and it’s not that person’s fault, you can find a real drop to the Reduction in dosage over time is something I would look at for my kids after the age of 25 or earlier if they feel that they need to, but we do know that we are building neuroplasticity in the brain.

We are building better neurons. I don’t want my children on their medication lifelong. That’s not the point of it.

The point is to help their brain function better so they can function without medication and their conductor in their brain works better. We know that people can take different dosages and have completely different effects. We also know there’s a genetic difference on how much dopamine and norepinephrine that a person makes.

This is going to have a massive difference as to how they react. We want to have the lowest possible dose and increase only in order to achieve positive benefits while paying attention to any side effects that are arising. We as mothers are the best to know at what these side effects are.

From personal experience, I started my children taking Vinance in the school holidays. A lot of people believe taking school holidays as a break from medication can be really good, but my daughter actually kind of needs it every day if I’m honest and so do I. The reason I did it on school holidays was because I wanted to control the environment. I didn’t want to send them off to school, find out there was a substitute teacher and then have my child have a meltdown and then wonder what went wrong.

I don’t want to pick them up from school and hear all the negative things that happened that day but not be sure whether they happened or not. For me, I really wanted to use the school holidays as a time to really watch my kids closely just because it was the first time we’d ever done it before. If we were to do my third son, I probably wouldn’t be as concerned, but for me, I did use the school holidays and the weekends to try things.

You can always be in constant communication with your teachers. What the research says in terms of height and weight, and we never know how tall someone’s going to grow, right? The only real example we can give is with twins. If one twin is given ADHD medication and one isn’t, then who grows more? That is one of the only ways that this can really be studied.

If you look at the research and the data, it actually looks like kids with ADHD that are treated with ADHD medication actually are slightly higher in height and they actually have slightly heavier body mass indexes. But BMI doesn’t necessarily mean height, right? So you could mean that someone’s shorter and heavier, but it might mean they could have been taller. Actually, the research shows that the height is the same as well, if not taller.

So there is no research to show that it restricts height. The pediatrician did say that sometimes she does take kids off ADHD medication in school holidays, basically to refeed them. And they do use calorie, like high heavy calorie diets to try and build the kids up.

I think if you’re watching your kid’s food intake and they are eating enough, then I don’t think there would be any risk at all. But I suppose if you had a child who was on a really heavy dose and they weren’t eating at all, any days, then I think such a strong calorie restriction could affect height. And that’s a really hard one to know, but I wouldn’t come back to the medication and go, well, that’s going to restrict my child’s height, so I don’t want to take it.

I don’t think that’s the case. Well, that’s actually not what the research shows. In terms of risk to cardiovascular health, if you wanted to do best case scenario, you would try and improve cardiovascular health, or at least not put it at additional risk.

So there’s going to be the obvious things, like not smoking, not vaping, and also regular exercise. The other thing that comes up often is alcohol. A lot of people will DM me about this. Obviously, I’m not a medical professional. You should always follow your medical professional’s advice. However, I have drunk on ADHD medication, but what I will tell you is that I’m less likely to drink, I’m less interested in drinking, and I’m also less likely in binge eating.

So I actually have found it to be quite a reduction in alcohol and in food for me. So I do find myself more fit, strong, more focused at the gym, and overall more healthy. I think what Dr. Huberman is referring to is if you were to take medication, sit and smoke cigarettes, vape, drink a lot of alcohol, maybe smoke pot, weed, something like that, then obviously your cardiovascular health isn’t going to be in a great space because of all of those things that you’re doing.

However, a lot of the research says that doing those things can really affect the cardiovascular health, and that’s probably more of a risk than the ADHD medication. But you wouldn’t take the ADHD medication and do all of those things. Some of these drugs people will talk about that they found that it was difficult to sleep.

For me, that is a dosage and a timing issue. If you are having trouble sleeping, then you might not be somebody that can take your Vyvanse at 9am. You might be somebody that has to take it 5 or 6am.

And you know, you might find that you’re not somebody that can take a dexamphetamine after 2pm. You might find that, you know, 12 o’clock is your limit. You might find you need to limit your caffeine at the end of the day.

You might need a better wind down time. Some people find that that’s the case, and you might need to look at your dosage or your timing, or maybe that’s not the right drug for you. Everything is up to personal opinion.

Everything is up to your paediatrician, to your doctor, and to the conversation that you need to have with a significant other if you have one, and what your gut feels for you as a mother. Because that there, your gut and how you feel as a mother, I think overrides other people’s opinion. So you have to sit with what you believe and how you feel because you don’t want to push yourself into something that you’re not ready either.

Medicating a child is a lot of work. Constantly checking in, monitoring, speaking to your kids’ teachers, checking in with them, watching them closely is exhausting. But if you’re planning on taking the steps to medication, I don’t feel like you can take the script, take the dosage scheduled from the paediatrician or from the psychiatrist if it’s for you, and just take it without question.

I would always be looking up, thinking, and trying to problem-solve things, or ask for a different drug completely. Because some of that problem-solving, I do see people kind of give up easily. They go to one appointment, they get one prescription, and they’re like, well, that medication didn’t work for him, but they didn’t necessarily take the time to problem-solve it for themselves either.

And I know it’s expensive, but if you’re going to take the time to try, go in educated, and go in saying, look, I take this, my husband takes this, our family seems to go better with this drug. What can we try? And try to problem-solve it, and think about things yourself, and then go back with some more information. Please don’t get $600 in on the first appointment, get a script, and then not go back.

There’s so much more to learn, and I really encourage you to go into the Facebook community group, and ask questions, and share experiences. Because you are just trying to do the best thing for your child, and shit, that’s a hard job. And I was never somebody that I thought would medicate my six-year-old son.

I never thought, and my husband was like, I never thought we would do this. This is not what we wanted to do. But when I look back at the results, we have to do it for him.

And if I can have their brains functioning as well as possible, that’s important to me. And the other piece that I think sometimes people miss is confidence. My son started saying things to me in prep like, I’m not a good learner.

And that broke my heart, that he doesn’t think he’s a good learner. He thinks he can’t read. And he doesn’t think it’s going to go better.

And he knows he’s in the lowest group. He knows he’s not good. And that makes him not want to do it.

And I don’t want him to have a story in his head that he hates reading, because he’s terrible at it. Okay, so that pretty much sums up ADHD medication. It sums up what the medications are, why we take them, what it does to the brain, is it addictive, long-term consequences.

We’ve gone through the kids. I think we have well summarized it. If there’s anything that I haven’t covered, please let me know.

If you have any DMs that you would like to share, please feel free to send them through. I’d love you to join us on the Facebook community. I would love you to come across, give us a like, subscribe, share the episodes with a friend, jump into an ADHD group online on Facebook and say, hey, I listened to this episode on how and why we should medicate.

So anyway, I’m going to get off my high horse in this solo episode where I’ve just completely talked the entire time. You know where I am. You know where to find me.

Thank you so much for listening. And I hope this has helped you.