DMX as treatment for ADHD

[altair1972m]

I have Bad ADHD and Bi-Polar and had unnacceptable side effects from Strattera, Paxil, Trileptal, Lamictal, Abilify, Lexapro, and Focalin.  I have a low tolerance for drugs, but seem to be able to quit cold turkey with no issues from addicted drugs.  Past suicidal ideation is an issue.

Everytime I take dextramathoraphine for a cough, I seem to be a little happier, can focus on work better, and don't spill my guts to all my co-workers.  my primary said he did not like the studies he knew on DMX as an ADHD treatement.  Does anyone have any information that might indicate a safe dose and success at treating ADHD or bi-polar?  Are there long term effects of DMX used in low doses (as opposed to the doses used to get high)?

[specialmom]

Again, I'm just going to say okay to you babyalex even though I don't agree with you.  You are actually making an excellent case for medication . . .

[thebabyalex]

The pharmaceuticals are not solely to blame, but I think that a "reasonable" apportionment of blame is certainly forthcoming. However, not much will change; fewer might be pre-emptively drugged than before, only to be made up by more on the sick role.

[thebabyalex]

I don't see how a child, early in its elementary school career, can grow up thinking he has a brain disorder, and yet, manage to grow up with no hang-ups. My entire life was marked by mouthing the excuses that I had come to see as my biological limitations. The counselors came later in life, to tell me that "maybe" I should consider this line of work, blah, blah. And I thought that the ethics of the counseling profession would have frowned on such prescriptions during my fifty minute sessions!
I was drugged for the first four years of my school career, and in hindsight, I wonder for what good: my grades did not improve, my attitude towards teachers did not ameliorate, and most important, my seriously dysfunctional family life (father an alcoholic, but spare me the correlative studies!).
As an adult, in my thirties, still unmarried, undecided with my career, and going to school part-time, for the third and final time, I frequented the university counseling services, and was given the "standard" battery of pencil to paper diagnostic tests. The MMPI is a joke! My career as one of the faithful in the church of mental health ended. I made a clean break of it; I should have seen it coming years before but loosing my religion was a totuous affair with fits and starts. I have read and studied diligently over the topic of ADHD, as well as the lliterature on the history of psychiatry.
Drs. Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, and Thomas Scheff, I think, have it right, about "mental illness", that is. But the irrepressable nature of psychiatry, as that of culture's social engineer, is well ensconsed in our social and legal insttitutions, and under the aegis of the state, serves at its pleasure, and vice versa. The coercions as cure and the excuses of psychiatry are many, and it is all but impossible to enumerate them in this post. However, any mention of any normative definitions of normalcy and mental illness, respectively, must take into account the legal, ethical and psychosocial judgements made of deviance. It is not merely the anatomical and genetic context, however compelling the science, that our culture must come to settle the score on problems in living and social conduct. The present course of psychiatry, since the early 1970s, has seen the pendulum swing toward the biological and the determined (as that in "progressive" disease). It is hardly cynical to see both the strategic and economic advantages that such a consensus can assume. No doubt the pharmaceutical companies are to be blamed for the biomythology of mental illness, with its "reverse engineered" , speculative science of brain function. No one knows exactly how the "mechanism" of action of these drugs works in the so-called "imbalanced" brains, but one is to believe that some therapy has been effected, when, one's behavior is altered; alter the individual and you alter the social.

[Sandman2]

  Ya, specialmom was right.  this is a waste of my time.  adios

[Sandman2]

   Thank you for distilling down your motives and aims.  Mine are also simple.  To help people on this site who ask for it.  That is my agenda - pure and simple.  If they want information about meds, I give them a site to check out.  If they need help in working with their child, I try and provide that.  I have about 1400 posts on this and on the child behavior site.  Feel free to check them out.  Most people that post to this site have a desperate need for information, and I try to provide that.  Admittably, I also have my own bias's.  I am sure that you will disagree with some of my posts.  If you pretty much follow Dr. Breeding's work, I will disagree with some of yours.  I am also fairly sure that there are things that we both would agree on - as I really like some of Dr. Breeding's strategies.
   If you want, why not start a post on labeling kids in school and we can debate if it helps or not?

[thebabyalex]

I'm not trying to rain on your parade specialmom. My motives and aims can be distilled down to one thing: doing what I can to expose the myth of mental illness. You assert that, "a label is not a stigma.", and I would agree. However, a label carries with it the stigma of the deviant so labeled. Our culture handles "deviance" in many ways, and such doesn't necessarily result in the involvement of psychiatry, school, employer, or any other important social presence in the deviant's social network. Once the child or adult has reached the point of being labeled, many other things have happened to the individual. There is, as noted, the internalized notions of illness assumed in one's self-concept, that much is clear. Secondary deviance, as Thomas Scheff has called those forms of deviance that get the attention of the MH profession,  is no less a career for many who never manage to shirk one's trouble self-concept and social relations!