Disclaimer: This is not medical advice.
Hi everyone welcome back to another video on my channel my name is sarah dawn i have inattentive type adhd and i have been diagnosed for approximately almost three years now and since then i’ve also been taking the medication atomoxetine which is also called stratera i’ve got multiple other videos on my journey throughout taking this medication um and my experiences
Of adhd on my channel so if you’d like to have a look at those you’re welcome to i stand by my claim that atomoxetine absolutely changed my life and um i would be in a very different place than i am now without it um in fact probably one of my biggest fears is not being able to take my medication um but looking at a more positive side um you know it really has
Had a huge impact on my life to the point where i’m grateful every day that i’m able to take it and i want to talk a bit about the doses the dosages the doses um that you can take of atomoxetine and my personal experience with this and what i’ve read basically online and watched other people’s youtube videos etc i want to put a disclaimer out there that i am
Not a medical professional i’m just somebody who’s diagnosed with adhd um so please do not take this as medical advice and if you want to discuss doses you should really be doing that with your psychiatrist or doctor who really probably has a much better insight than myself who’s just done a little bit of research online and have some experience myself and yeah i
Feel that medication is a two-way street and that when you’re making a decision about it it should be not just your doctor telling you what to do but also you um having your own opinion about and you know being able to make your own choices as well um so the medication that i personally take is atomoxetine it’s sometimes known as straterra and the box i buy now
Just as atomoxetine on it but occasionally it says strahara so i think it just depends where you get it but the actual medication is atomoxene i think strata is more like a brand name um so before i started taking this medication i decided to look online for what it was about i learned about you know how it was an snri how it was first brought out and tried as
An antidepressant and they just fell in look i guess and found out that it actually can do wonders for people with adhd and my psychiatrist told me himself that it is really good for people who have more anxiety and depression symptoms from their adhd and it’s good for balancing out emotions as well so i was really keen to try this medication obviously there’s
So many other types of medication you can take like there’s plenty of stimulants as well um but my doc my doctor recommended this one for me so i thought i’d give it a go i was very very anxious about side effects so i told him that i made it very clear that i was anxious about side effects whether that made him give me a smaller dose of this medication or just
From his experience a smaller dose is probably best to start everyone on i’m not sure but i began on 10 milligrams however when i’d researched online previously i saw a lot of people saying that they’d started on 40 milligrams and you know the doctors either recommended that they work their way up or they try different medication because they found that they had
A lot of side effects and you know being anxious about taking side effects it put me right off the medication and i you know was very very worried about taking it but i know i had to do it because i was in such a bad place so i had three days off work that’s when i decided to first take it and i took the 10 milligrams and i the first day i took it i felt very
Very sleepy i’m very glad that i was at home i don’t think i would have been able to work um and bearing in mind this was just 10 milligrams which is a very very low dose and possibly the lowest so she can buy i’m not sure um so yeah i took 10 milligrams for one month and i was sure say from day two to sort of like the two week period i had very very very mild
Symptoms occasionally my stomach didn’t feel quite well but you know i suffer from stomach issues anyway um so if that exasperated that or it was just um it was just a coincidence i don’t know actually i think anxiety has something to do with that because quite anxious about taking it but you know and i also had a bit of a dry mouth but basically after that i
Didn’t really have any uh side effects and i was very very happy about that um every single month we i pretty much went back to my doctor and he prescribed me the next um dose up i think it goes 8 10 18 25 40. i think it’s something like that so what i ended up doing i think you know it was quite a long time ago so i can’t remember exactly all the details but
I ended up at 30 and that was taking three ten milligram tablets because that’s something that my doctor said can be done with this medication obviously don’t just try that like a check um and speak to your doctor about that but this is what he recommended for me so he suggested i try the 30 milligrams at one stage and i tried the 30 milligrams and it was too
Much for me and it’s really shocked me because you know i’d seen all these people take you know be recommended like 40 milligrams on their first go so being 30 was too much for me was um you know i kind of thought maybe my adhd wasn’t as bad as those people and you know had all these like ideas of why that was but i’m not sure i think everybody’s brain is just
Totally different um for many different reasons and you know how you can be sensitive to a certain medication and someone else isn’t like for me cocodemol like it’s really really good for getting rid of migraines but it makes me really really sleepy whereas i know somebody who can take it and has no effects on like double the dose of that what what i would take
So i think it has something to do with that as well just like in a theory that i have um yeah so i um told my doctor that the medication um i pretty much emailed him actually and said the medication that i’m on is giving me two bad side effects and i think i told him that it was making me too sleepy which would be making it very hard for me to work it was easy for
Me to focus in some ways but i couldn’t enjoy that because my emotions didn’t feel right if that makes sense like i’ve talked about emotional blunting um on one of my videos before as i’ve heard a lot of the people with who take this medication have that issue as well basically i felt like a bit of a zombie until wow for the whole day and he recommended i take
That medication at night so i started taking it in the evening and then the next day i was still feeling that way um it actually was really difficult coming down from so i was taking it in the morning and i had to switch the evenings i pretty much went a day without taking it and i did get some physical and emotional symptoms from that which weren’t pleasant um
So i guess they have some withdrawal effects perhaps but um yeah i suddenly felt my adhd back in full force again and it just was very very like unpleasant and i couldn’t believe the difference in how i felt um but anyway i was able to take that again in night time but then the next day i still was feeling quite drowsy until like mid-afternoon or after lunch at
Least and so i you know continued that way for quite a few days so i basically just told my doctor that i couldn’t take this dose anymore and so he prescribed 25 milligrams for me and um yeah that was a lot better in that i had no side effects at all but it was enough to still help me improve on the symptoms of adhd that i was dealing with on a daily basis you
Know and i’ve been on this medication for quite a while now and i did go up to 30 at one stage just to try it again because i thought you know i’d been on it for quite a while and it might have a positive effect on me and less side effects and i felt exactly the same as i had done before i feel that i’ve gone from having like moderate severity adhd to very mild
Adhd and i couldn’t really ask for more than that because you know you’re never going to get perfect but it has had such a huge impact on my life that i like to share that with other people and let you know that you know sometimes maybe you’re recommended like a higher dose perhaps um and that’s why it hasn’t a medication hasn’t worked for you um so something
Perhaps to take to your doctor if you’re on a too high a dose and you’re feeling like it’s not helping you that much but you know i’ve had people tell me that they take like 80 milligrams um and it works really well for them and they have minimal side effects so so yeah for some people a higher dose really really does help them um but for me personally uh 25
Milligrams works really really well so i think that’s all i really wanted to say in this video i hope you guys are well and you know i’d love to know about your experiences with this medication um so leave a comment down below if you have any experiences and i will see you guys again soon
Transcribed from video
Discussing The Doses Of Atomoxetine/Strattera For ADHD By Finding Your Serenity