In my add coaching and adhd counseling experience, I have found stimulants to help ADDers to be alert, to focus on tasks, and to be less distractible. Yet, with many ADDers I treat, I find they have difficulty with time management unless there are serious negative consequences for not completing assignments. Along these lines, at school, ADDers can be charming and manipulative and get professors to forgive them for being late regarding papers due or tests to take. If the same professors told them that if due dates are consistently missed, their grades would be lower, Adders often would get aroused enough to meet the deadline.
I also have found, that often stimulants do not control addictions like excessive drinking or smoking. ADDers frequently have no awareness or lack an inhibitory mechanism and cross the boundary between acceptable amounts of a substance and abuse of it. It’s not a conscious plan and ADDers, like typical addicts are regretful afterwards. It helps to have a significant other or close friend who cues them, when they reach that boundary, so that the ADDer can be aware of his tendency to become totally disinhibited.
1 comment:
I think you should check some of the recent research on smoking and dopamine. Although everyone knows smoking is bad for you in the long run, during the immediate here and now where most ADDers live,the demon weed gives temporary relief to cognitive impairment and anxiety. "Nicotine modifies these signaling processes and may help dampen extraneous neuronal activity (Conti, 2007. Retrieved from: http://tinyurl.com/284kyv3)."
And in spite of all the hype by the ADD coaching industry about the joys of having ADD, there are lots of reasons a person may take the short term rewards of smoking over the long term consequences. The primary one being how all the non-smoking campaigns are marketed towards enjoying life.
D-oh! If smokers wanted to live, why would they smoke? I say, come up with a provable answer to unconscious death wishes and you'll be much further down the road in treating all addictions. Of course, this doesn't fit with the perpetually positive mold of modern day psychobabble.
Post a Comment