Obsessional Special Interest

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First of all, it is so annoying trying to research things on google when it is all child oriented. Maybe using the new ASD reference is messing it up but honestly the DSM was changed in 2013, people should catch up with the times. (Glad they combined it all together because I hate the jokes people make regarding the old term)

Anyway so this is the thing, I have an obsessional interest with writing fiction and being creative and I did it every day all day hard core. Well eventually I hit a phase of what I will just call anhedonia because it beats explaining the feelings or lack of. So I researched as I always do with my problems and realized it might have been a brain reward system issue. I was put on Vyvanse and it instantly cured it.

I've been on Vyvanse for nearly a year now and I don't know if it's an issue of not working but I still experience intense focus, the thing is that it's not on my writing, I will try to write but then I'll drift away to the internet, end up on Facebook or YouTube and by the time my focus breaks, it's been like hour(s) and then I will tell myself I need to work on my story and will be able to for a very short period of time until I get distracted again. The focus is there, it just switches from one thing to another frequently.

I really enjoy the creativity and what writing allows me to do and I used to be able to control what I was doing but now I can't. It's like anything of even slight interest to me, I'll get totally absorbed in. I don't know if the medicine stopped working or if I just lost my interest but I was wondering what thoughts and opinions might be out there about something like this.

I know a girl who has a similar story. In her younger teen years she loved to draw. She would come home from school, go to her room and spend the rest of the day drawing and listening to music. Her parents were concerned about her lack of social interaction and other interests so they made her go to therapy. They put her on something and she said it killed her desire and creativity. It helped her in some ways, but she couldn't stand feeling like a zombie so she stopped taking it. Her desire and creativity never really came back. She can still hyper focus on other things though.

That is really sad to hear. It might have been one of my medications, there was a new one that I had been on, a mood stabilizer for my bipolar and then I heard it was prescribed primarily for bipolar mania, so obviously it was a mood downer.

I had been on it for 5 months before the anhedonia hit me and in my search to find out what caused it, I thought of all my medications and then figured that it made more sense that if it was med related that it had to be the most recent one I had been put on. I thought maybe it was working too well and actually pushing me into depression, though again the Vyvanse seemed to cure the anhedonia issue.

So if it was the med, I figured maybe the Vyvanse was counter acting it by bringing me up, enough to go back to normal and then I decided, well as long as the combo works well together, I'll just keep it that way.

I had been started on 20 mg of Vyvanse and after many months was upgraded to 40 in double doses of 20 mg tablets twice a day. Well then I started taking a third capsule and pulling it in half and taking half a capsule with each 20 mg dose.

(I could only do this at a limited level or I would of ran out early and the early allowance at some pharmacies is no more than five days.)

Now I'm wondering maybe if due to all the time that has passed, if maybe tolerance to the Vyvanse is building and in reaction the bipolar med is getting stronger.

(The dose for that med was also increased due to anger and aggression increasing.)

Thing is now I have been switched to a different mood stabilizer that is supposed to work on higher anger levels and I am wondering how this new med might work. (being it also primarily works on mania, will it repeat the same as the previous one and push me too far down or will it balance me out?)

The intense focus is still there but it's almost like I am experiencing ADD symptoms due to switching from one thing to another, attention and focus is there, but it seems I can never stick to one activity for as long as I used to and I am also unaware at how much time I put into a certain activity, at least until I check the clock and see an hour has spun by.

Came back here since I needed to make another post and so a year later I am responding. (It's just what I do, some people have thought I was dumb to respond to old comments.) I have to say that is a horrible story. I am in a bit of a gutter but nothing like before. I sure hope things got better for her.

I used to be able to write and not get a writer's block because I would have pictures in my head and write them all down and I didn't have a problem with it. I used to make my hand sore too from all the writing. Then I was put on new medicine in 6th grade and that is when the writer's blocks started and I had lot of unfinished stories since then and then I quit taking them as an adult and my old writing ability never came back. I still write though but not the way I did when I was a kid. I have thought if the pills attributed to it.

I could never do pen and paper writing lol but I can type. For me I think the block is due to staying in the same genre. Like I am really good at writing teens in high school, drama, sometimes a bit of action and I can make the bad boy likeable every time.

Sad thing is, my best story which is 61 chapters, the story was so long I think I put just about all of my ideas into it. I then wrote another story which was 20 something chapters, but it was a science fiction so that was easier, I then wrote the sequel to the first one and that was 32 chapters...

Managed to push out an 11 chapter story and then one more after that and the last one really didn't have much of an ending, I just had to stop, there wasn't anymore left. It's always good to stick to what you are good at but you can't rely on that forever.