By Ryan Isreal
What’s wrong with this kid? A question that I know has been asked about me a lot in my life. Sometimes in front of me, sometimes to me, and probably even more when I’m not around. I first learned about mental illness when I was in the fourth grade. The fifth-grade class came down to give us presentations on different disorders. I remember hearing some familiar things. I’d heard of “Autism” and “Aspergers.” Nine-year-old me found the latter very funny. Ass Burgers. I also heard about ADHD. That day I went home and I told my mom, “I think I have ADHD.” Probably not surprising – I’m told my dad had it pretty bad. My mom said she didn’t think I had it but would get me tested for it all the same. She then had my IQ tested instead. I didn’t understand this at the time and just assumed I was okay. There wasn’t anything wrong with me; I was just smart.
Like most people, middle school was a terrible three years for me. It was filled with bullying, missed assignments, and the rest of the usual middle school shenanigans. This period was also when I came to a harsh and sudden realization: I was not as smart as I thought. For the previous eleven years, I had been told I was smart, taken out of class at snack time with one other student to do a special math class because we were “gifted.” Not anymore. Eventually, I came to my solution — I simply wouldn’t do the work. I was so scared of doing poorly on the work that I preferred I get a zero for not doing it, insisting that I knew how to do it and was just bored by it rather than admit that I didn’t understand how to do it.
This didn’t just apply to schoolwork. It applied to everything. If I wasn’t good at it immediately, then I wasn’t good enough to do it at all ever, and there was no point in me trying. If you look around my house, you’ll find instruments I half-learned to play years ago before giving up: piano, guitar, bass, trumpet, flute, french horn, drums, the list goes on. Equipment from sports I half-tried: soccer, basketball, baseball, gymnastics, fencing, the list goes on. This attitude extended to people; if someone didn’t like me, or I didn’t like them, what was the point in trying to change that? It took me a while to realize that it was primarily my fault I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was younger.
Eventually, about halfway through the eighth grade, my mom caved and, at a visit to my pediatrician, asked about my having ADHD. We talked about it and I was given what I thought would be my saving grace, my key to being a functioning person who could do the work he had to do and do the bare minimum of what was asked of him—a prescription for 18 milligrams of Concerta a day. The next day we got the medicine; I took it and waited 40 minutes. It worked. I felt, well, normal. My inner monologue shut up. My hands weren’t shaking anymore; even my handwriting looked better. I took it the next day, nothing. The next day, nothing. It had worked once. After that, once, all it gave me was headaches and a dry mouth; in exchange, it had taken away my appetite, and I had to set reminders on my phone to eat. I went back to the doctor, and he suggested we raise my prescription to 27 milligrams a day. Still nothing, then 36, still nothing. Just headaches, dry mouth, and no appetite.
After striking out with Concerta, another change was made to 30 milligrams of Vyvanse a day. Vyvanse worked as well as Concerta did, which was not at all. I will give Vyvanse credit where credit is due, though it never gave me any headaches. However, those were replaced with me being the most irritable person on the planet during the comedown. After 30 milligrams didn’t work, that was the end for Vyvanse; I didn’t up the dosage.
I started high school with a new attempt at a miracle pill: thirty milligrams of extended-release Adderall daily. Keep in mind that I weighed at most 120 pounds at this time, and guess what? Nothing. So what happened next? Forty milligrams of extended-release Adderall a day. I have no positive associations with Adderall at all— those little orange pieces of shit were terrible. I’d take it, and my mouth would be bone dry for the rest of the day, even just a minute after drinking water. Headaches from the Concerta felt like a belt was wrapped tightly around my head; Adderall was a hammer smashing straight into the center of my forehead every day. Concerta and Vyvanse made me forget to eat, and I had to remind myself that I had to; I never felt hungry. On Adderall, the idea of putting food in my mouth was disgusting. I could not eat for the fourteen hours it was in effect. I was lucky if I ate one whole meal a day. The best part of all this? I was still having all those school troubles. I never did homework; in-class essays were either easy A’s or the bane of my existence. Thankfully, the days of 40xr Adderall didn’t last too long, probably about three to five weeks. Turns out rapid weight loss and constant amphetamine use were not very good for my health.
After the stimulants didn’t work, the doctor went a different route: Strattera. A selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. The fun thing about this one is that while I could take the other pills and tell within a few hours if it would work for me or not, I had to take this for at least six weeks before I could expect to see any results. They started me at 15 milligrams, then 30, then 50, then 60—still nothing. Finally, the doctor decided I should stop taking it. He forgot to tell me one thing, though, with the other pills, I could just stop taking them one day and be fine; Strattera, however, was not the same. I was supposed to carefully lower my dosage for about three weeks before stopping. I didn’t do that.
Instead, right before winter break of freshman year, I threw them out and stopped immediately. My family and I drove up to a rental house in Georgia for the break. I felt possibly the worst I have ever felt in my entire life that week. I slept in the house’s basement, and I may have gone upstairs three times. I stayed in bed and went to the bathroom when I felt like I would throw up. Withdrawal is a bitch.
My mom got the idea for me to see a neurologist. After our meeting, I was given a prescription for Guanfacine, two milligrams a day. I was used to hearing bigger numbers attached to my prescriptions at this point; two milligrams a day sounded like it would do nothing. I took Guanfacine once. I don’t remember that day. I was kind of skipping in time. I couldn’t keep my head up or my eyes open. I simply couldn’t function on this tiny little pill for some reason. I didn’t take Guanfacine a second time.
After this, my mom raised the idea that I had had Lyme Disease when I was young. I was given a round of antibiotics and sent on my way. They never tested to see if it went away. My mom thought that maybe I had the – not fully agreed upon to exist disease – chronic/long term Lyme disease. Some people believe it can have lasting effects on people if it doesn’t completely go away. Most say that’s not true. My mom, always a fan of pseudoscience and hippie stuff, went with the former. I got blood tested, and lo and behold; I did not have Lyme Disease.
At the time, I had a lot of physical symptoms. Constant shaking, zoning out, losing time, full-body jerks, etc. So the idea came up, my dad had epilepsy; it’s what killed him. His kid is showing signs of seizures. Not the big grand mal/ tonic-clonic ones. He didn’t have those either, but the smaller kind: absence seizures and focal seizures. The neurologist agreed, and I was referred for an EEG to see if I had epilepsy. I was given strict instructions; I couldn’t eat before my EEG and could only sleep for at most four hours the night before my EEG. I was scheduled for two o’clock pm, so they suggested I sleep from six am to ten am. Upon my arrival, they brought me into a room. It was pretty empty—a hospital bed with a pinwheel lying on it and a light hanging right above the bed. The doctor told me to lay down in the bed and get comfortable. After I laid down, she attached some stuff to my head to measure my brain activity – I think –I don’t know how EEGs work. She then left the room and started talking to me through a speaker on the wall.
“Just lay there, Ryan. I’m going to start flashing the light now.” I don’t know how long it lasted, but it felt too long for me. A strobe light was going off at most a foot away from my face. After that finally ended, I was given another instruction.
“Now grab the pinwheel on your right side and start blowing on it, so it spins.” So I grabbed the pinwheel and blew and blew and blew full breaths. Have you ever blown on a pinwheel for five minutes straight? Let me tell you what happens: pins and needles all over my body. I was super lightheaded. Finally, the doctor said to stop, and I was given my final instruction.
“Sleep.” I was already on the verge of passing out, so falling asleep wasn’t very difficult. I waited a month for the results, and finally, we got them.
“He does not have epilepsy.” It was good news, but I was angry. It meant that what was wrong with me wasn’t something physical in my brain. It was my stupid fucking subconscious and chemical imbalances ruining everything. I cried to my mom that night.
The following few things we tried were kind of a blur. There was Zoloft, some non-prescription stuff, like GABA and 5-HTP and the like, but eventually, I stopped taking stuff for it. Shockingly, ignoring the problem didn’t make it go away. It was also around this time when I started to think “What if there isn’t anything wrong with me and I’m just a piece of shit and everyone hates me?” This idea was later used as evidence of what was wrong with me.
Summer before senior year, my mom recommended me for a complete psychiatric evaluation. The prevailing theory then was that I was autistic.
I don’t remember too much of what happened there, a lot of puzzles, a lot of talking. The doctor asked me questions about anxiety, and I responded to her with the completely normal thoughts and habits that everyone has: I have no real friends; they’re all just messing with me; everyone in every public space is always staring at me and judging my every move, you know, the usual stuff. I remember one part of the evaluation that made me so angry I couldn’t finish it. She had handed me a laptop and told me that it would flash with different shapes on the screen; every time it was a star, I had to press the spacebar, anything else, just wait. I hated it. It was repetitive and stupid and boring and gross. I yelled at the doctor. She told me that she had to count that section of the test as invalid.
A few weeks after the evaluation and the results were ready. I sat down with my mom, and the doctor started going over the results. I tuned most of it out. I just wanted to finally learn what the fuck was wrong with me after trying to figure it out for the past eight years. I wish I could tell you what was going through my head as I heard her read out the diagnoses, but I don’t know what was going through my head. I was just listening.
“Other Specified Impulse and Conduct Disorder, Other Specified Depressive Disorder, Social Pragmatic Communications Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder.” With those five phrases, all the problems I had faced for the past, well, forever, had finally been defined. Did hearing these instantly make all those problems disappear or even get better at all? No. Not at all. I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with all this, but something is comforting about knowing what it is.