Hello all. I am new to this forum but have joined in hopes of receiving helpful advice from those of you suffering in a similar way.

About 9 months ago, I was diagnosed with adhd. Previous to that, as a 13-14 year old, I had my first diagnosis of adhd plus extremely bad social anxiety disorder.

About four months ago, my doctor prescribed me adderall 20mg ir once daily in the morning. At first I felt great. I felt like my mind was no longer foggy and I was able to actually truthfully concentrate on daily activities, conversations, and basically everything else "normal" people were naturally capable of doing without feeling as if it was a big exhausting mentally torturous ordeal just to get through a day.

Unfortunately, within about a week or two, I began to notice it didn't seem to work anymore.

To preface this with a quick history of the past year or so of my journey to get better- I was originally started on 20mg celexa and 0.5mg clonazepam twice daily. I didn't notice much of a difference other than I seemed to not be so emotionally up and down. Specifically, I experience a pretty good decrease in my serious cranky and randomly explosive outbursts of uncontrollable irritability and snippiness. How ever, celexa turned me into a whale and I discontinued that for the sake of my physical health. To add to that, about two months in to the celexa/clonazepam therapy, I noticed a very big drop in the effectiveness of the clonazepam. When I told my doctor about this, and about my recent quite debilitating breakthrough anxiety attacks.... For some reason he discontinued my prescription to it, cold turkey. I wasn't really to bothered by that because after all... It didn't work efficiently for me anymore. So then, I was put on wellbutrin. That stuff turned me into an emotional basket case within two weeks and I literally flushed the rest of the script.

Next monthly check up, I filled the Dr in on everything, and he began asking all sorts of questions. Questions about my work history, how much i sleep at night (my response was... Night? I could sleep all day if you let me.), eating habits, whether I had issues maintaining a thought process or had any difficulty with my short term memory. He asked if my mind was active, I replied with, "yes. I have so many thoughts (most of them incomplete more often than not) in my mind at any given time. It's tiresome."

Then he proceeded to ask if these issues had impacted My performance at my place of employment at time. And yes, yes it certainly did and still does.

We spoke for about an hour and he suddenly broke out the prescription pad and wrote me up for 30 20mg adderall ir tablets to be taken upon waking up for the day.

It helped in the beginning but I'm assuming I very quickly developed quite the impressive tolerance to it. However, it's going on month five and I'm terrified to ask for a dosage increase, or perhaps multiple doses through the day for fear of coming off as a drug seeking junkie. There was a few days where the one 20mg dose in the morning was so ineffective (I'm talking... I felt absolutely nothing from it whatsoever) that I got desperate and took another an hour or so after the first (it takes about 30mins for it to kick in, for me personally). Still nothing. So I took another. 60mg total in two hours. And then finally I felt that "normal" feeling again. I was absolutely taken aback by the fact that I had to somewhat experiment, and that I required such a drastic increase in dosage for the medication to be effective for me.

On top of ALL of that, I've have severe insomnia for years And years. I've tried all of the sleeping meds. They all work for about a week, and then boom... Completely useless. Hello no sleep for almost four days straight,regardless of whether I had taken my adderall that day or not.

Currently, I'm on restoril 15mg, and since I seem to have a high tolerance for that specific drug class, the 15mg literally did nnnooooothiiiing. Now that I've been on it for a few months, it's gotten even worse. I have to take 5-6 of them, have my nightly beer, and hope to god it helps enough that I can at least lay down without fidgeting and twitching and going insane from my RLS... And then maybe, just maybe, I'll get an hour or two of "sleep". Before the restoril, I tried seroquel (100mg ir at bed time), which by far was the best med I've tried to get me to sleep. Alas, around the 2nd or 3rd week, it became completely ineffective. Plus, I began to notice I was having common cardiac side effects from the older tricyclic antidepressant meds so I stopped taking that as well.

I am almost desperate enough to just say eff it and ask my doc to let my try out some seriously last resort sleep meds. I just want to be able to sleep again.



HOWEVER, I firmly believe that the sleeping issues have Nothing to do with the adderall, as I have truthfully been an extreme insomniac for the better part of my life. And at this point in my life, I cannot afford to be anything but my best. And I cannot do that when I am catatonic from sleep deprivation.

Has anyone else had this problem? Do you think it'd be safe to have a heart to heart with my doc and suggest a new treatment regimen to include an increased dosage of the adderall, perhaps one upon waking up, and another at lunch time? And also a stronger sleep medication so that I can succeed at my job and be able to have the mental clarity and ability to finish school? I just feel so guilty asking for more meds, or different ones altogether, because I feel like she'll think I'm drug seeking. But i just want to be able to be a normal person. I want to be able to sleep regularly, and function mentally up to par in college and cosmetology school. I'd really love to have my Klonopin back to help me perform better in school, especially during tests... And also at work, working as a waitress at a very very very busy restaurant. I hate to feel like I need medication to cope with things normal people handle just fine, but I've come to the realization that I need to bite the bullet and do what I need to do during this incredibly important time in my life.



What would y'all suggest? How should I go about bringing this all up to my doctor?

Are there any specific sleeping meds you might be able to suggest I ask her about?

I have tried trazodone, ambien, restoril, seroquel, xanax (not proud of that one but I was desperate for sleep), lunesta, all the bs stuff you can get at the grocery store, etc. I'm a bit afraid of meds similar to seroquel just due to the fact that I had pretty not okay cardiac side effects from it. And the hangover was pretty bad too.

I've heard amitriptyline is a pretty "knock you on your arse" med but as far as I've researched, it's in the same drug class is seroquel... And i once saw a close family friend sleep walk under the influence of the amitriptyline and almost burn her house down trying to bake frozen French fries and then totally forgetting about them for 9 hours. So that scares me. Ugh. I just don't know what to do. I need to increase my adderall. It's affecting my job, my second job, my performance in college and cosmetology school, and my third job training horses. It lasts maybe 2 hours and then once it starts to wear off, I feel physically terrible. One dose at 6am is not enough to keep me on my toes and clear minded from 6am-12am. But again I fear my doctor will think I'm just Trying to get more drugs just because. But no! I just want to feel "normal".