Ending change?

Most of what you've typed there just seems to be the same as what you sent before...
The point I was trying to make, in questioning your "experiance" of the drug, is that no matter how much information you read / watch / hear / absorb about pretty much *any* drug, you can still *never* know what it really *feels* like to take it - how it affects the way you think and act so on.
I admit that I, myself, have only minor experiance with various speedy type drugs, but I do remember very, very well how it made me feel - how it felt as though I could focus all my thoughts, all my attention to the intensity of a laser beam. All the rest of my knowledge (?) comes from reading, studying and discussing such things with the motorheads I met in rehab.

Now; Direct responses:
"You need read between the lines. By helping a person not be so easily distracted, doesnt mean the person pays better attention the he/she normally would."

I really don't get why you keep on typing that? Surely being in a state of attentive concentration is the direct opposite to being all flaky and distracted?


"IE, if someone is taking Ritalin just to help them focus for an exam or something it isnt going to help in reality."

Yeh, I know that much - That to get the best theraputic effect from the drug, it needs to build up to a certain level in the patients body, like how anti-depressants work, yeah?


"Taking an overdose of ritalin, ie 'too much', has been medically proven to cause hallucination, ie 'seeing things that arent there'. It doesnt have to be chronic abuse, it can occur after a sole overdosage."

Like I said before - depends on how big the overdose is. One extra pill taken on top of a day's normal dose (only on that one day - not everyday), while still being "too much" , isn't going to make someone hallucinate.
On that note, none of the coke heads or speedies I've met have ever talked about getting hallucinations, except for sometimes, right at the end of a prolonged binge.

"The point you are missing is that Ritalin isnt only taken by people that need it. Duh."

I wasn't trying to claim that it was - I apologise if it seemed as though I was.

Duuh!

"For a ADD/ADHD sufferer, Ritalin does in fact make the brain function more like it should, chemically."

I don't see how that can possibly be the case? I don't know what kind of metabolism ADD sufferererers have, but surely, taking any kind of amphetamine (or similar) will make it go faster?

"Its not a masking drug or euphoric drug, it supplements normal reactions in the brain that affect cognitive skills. There is not compounding effect of ritalin, there is the dosage required by volume to bring the brain chemically in balance. Taking more and more, doesnt give you more and more focus."

It must do, up to a certain point that is...?
Consider this: Little Myk has a raging case of ADD, so to try to help him, Dr. Retread prescribes ritalin, starting with a small dose and titrating upwards if needed. After one week on the starting dose, Little Myk comes back to Dr Retread's office and his mum says that, "he has been a little better this past week, but is still all over the place." Dr Retread increases the dose and says come back in another week ... and so it goes until the ritalin dose seems to having the desired effect.
A small amount has an effect, but not enough - a larger amount has a better effect, but still not enough - a still larger amount seems to work just right.
Taking even more on top of that must surely have even more of an effect, like any other kind of speed? The improved attention span and focused concentration keeps increasing way past where it's supposed to be and starts to seem more like OCD - I'm as certain as I really can be about this without taking handfuls of pills myself, as I've heard about it several times, from several different people. One young lady I met said that at first it was great, that she could pay attention in class, get her homework done without standing up and wandering off every few minutes and so on, but when she started taking way too many pills it almost seemed as though she became a "slave" to her focus. "Slave" might not really be the best word, but it's the one she used - she talked about times when she would sit for hours, sometimes all night, tweezing the little hairs out of her legs - she'd completely lose track of time and would often carry on tweezing long after there was nothing left to tweeze, or she'd spend a whole day tidying up her room, vacuuming and dusting and polishing over and over and over.


"No matter how much gas you put in the tank, that by itself doesnt give you horsepower, your fuel injectors can only spray so much fuel into the intake no matter what."

Yeah, I know that - that there are only a certain amount of receptor sites in the brain for a ritalin molecule to bind with and once they're saturated, then it wouldn't matter how many more pills you took, the effects wouldn't increase any further.

I guess the point I've been trying to make here is that there's a lot of "grey area" on either side of what might be considered an ideal dose for a person. At a starting point, with no ritalin at all, there are all the myriad problems that ADD brings. As the dose slowly increases, the symptoms decrease, while the "good" effects also increase. Between the starting point of None At All, and the dose that achieves the desired state, there is a grey area where you can see the therapeutic effects increasing with the dose.
Even the middle point, where the drugs are having the exact effect that the doctor wants isn't a sharp delineation, it's more of a big blurry line. Above that, there is again, a lot of grey area where it can be seen that the increasing dose is having a stronger and stronger, but no longer beneficial effect, until right at the top, there's another big blurry line representing drug psychosis with all of its expected symptoms, ie. hallucinations.

(I'm not really at all happy with the way that that all came out - I hope it's clear enough that you can see the points I was trying to make though...)

I'd also really like to see a reply to that other post I sent, down at the bottom of the board.
The two disorders (or the two different types of the same disorder) that are most associated with ritalin: ADD and ADHD are both named the way they are because because the sufferer is Deficient, or Lacking normal attention / concentration skills.
To spell it out completely bluntly, they have problems paying attention and concentrating.
So what on Earth is the ritalin doing if it isn't helping them to be more attentive?


--Myk