ADD and Pregnancy

I feel very strongly that I need to address this. When I started researching alternative methods to deal with my ADD, other than my Adderall, I found one blog post and a lot of message boards. I feel like with a lot of things surrounding ADD, this is really not addressed by a lot of people.

You CANNOT take Adderall while you are pregnant. I remember this is something my psychiatrist started to reinforce with me when I first started taking Adderall at 15 years old. So I knew as soon as I found out I was pregnant that I had to go off of it. Looking back, I probably should have gone off of it as soon as we started trying to get pregnant, but there is nothing I can do about that now. I was 7 weeks along when I went off of the Adderall, so my doctor is comfortable that the baby will be ok.

At first, I didn't think that being off of my meds would be a huge problem. I didn't have the haze that usually comes with being off of my meds but I was forgetful. I write everything down anyway so I thought I would be able to push through it. With the change in my hormones though, I stopped caring about much. I was able to get little tasks down and the major stuff like paying the bills wasn't a problem. But motivating myself to clean the house, cook or really get up off the coach was getting to the point where I was really frustrated with myself. I have had my diagnosis for 9 years. I had an excellent psychiatrist for 4 of those years and she helped me work on skills that would help me cope with my ADD, medicated or not.

After talking to several friends and family members, I decided to make an appointment with a doctor that specializes in mental health care during pregnancy. I will let you know how that goes and what we decide on doing. I have read about eating Chia Seeds, using essential oils and using the skills learned with your psychiatrist. So far, writing everything down in several places is the only thing that works. And it only works some of the time. I am hoping I can come up with another solution with my doctor.

I plan to keep you updated every trimester on how everything is going with this pregnancy, including how I am coping with my ADD while off of Adderall.