Back in 2002, I had posted a thread that garnered some rather ill fame about my daughter and her rather heavy-duty Ritalin dosage.
In the way off chance that anybody cared, I figured I would give an update.
So…
In the summer of 1995, we transitioned to a smaller dose of Strattera, with a very minimal dose of ritalin in the afternoon (without which, she didn’t sleep until the wee hours of the morning).
We spent most of the last year getting rid of that afternoon ritalin, and starting after Chrismas, slowly lowering her Strattera.
This summer she went completely unmedicated. She gets a little wired outside of school… sometimes with bad results, but she’s doing ok.
School started 2 weeks ago, and while my ex was worried, it seems she’s doing just fine. Her creativity seems to have spiked up as she’s started drawing and such again, and while impulse control continues to be something we’re working on, I’m happy to say that she seems to no longer need medication to get through a day of school.
I wasn’t around for the original thread, but this touched me:
One of the things that tells me I’m in bad shape is when I stop being creative. I learned to recognize this as a Bad Sign years ago and it’s helped me stop several downsloping situations before they went from bad to nasty. Best wishes for your family and hooray to your daughter for taking ownership of her own life!
My little girl is 10, will be eleven in December… yeah, we’re very excited about the whole idea of her being off meds. She’s never really been zombied by her pills, but her creativity seemed to take a hit. Now that she’s cleared up, her juices are flowing and shortly before my move to PA, she drug her brother into staging a sock-puppet play for our benefit
(The dating people vs. the Sludge monster, with my then 18 month old as the sludge monster)
I’ll see if I can dig up the original thread. It led to a rather nasty Pit thread, due to my use of sarcasm and dark humor in how I dealt with my feelings, if I recall.
