u/OohLaDiDaMrFrenchMan

Autistic with combined type ADHD here. I interrupt people so badly and I don’t notice I’m doing it unless people point it out. Apparently it happens many times within my conversations. There are multiple reasons I can think of: a) I get excited to share my thoughts, b) I don’t want to forget my thoughts so I try to get them out there asap, c) I’m trying to show that I’m listening but I do it wrong, and d) I’m just plain bad at knowing when pauses in conversations are supposed to happen and when it’s my turn to speak.

I’ve been medicated since I was 15 but still my general impulsivity and hyperactivity when it comes to social stuff is so poorly managed. I think I just never learned good social habits, but also, I don’t really understand what good social habits even ARE because I’m fucking autistic and social rules are really hard for me to wrap my mind around. How do I learn how to socialize better?

I’m diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, treatment-resistant depression, and ADHD, along with a couple other diagnoses that aren’t relevant here. I’m stable on Haldol, Geodon, Wellbutrin, and Adderall and am additionally receiving therapeutic ketamine every three weeks for my depression.

My prescriber wants to trial Auvelity so that I can still take some Wellbutrin while stopping my ketamine treatments. He thinks the glutamatergic properties of the Auvelity will do the same thing to my brain that the ketamine is doing. My antipsychotics control my psychosis pretty well right now but I’ve had instances where it was nevertheless triggered by certain substances (not Adderall or Wellbutrin thankfully, but by weird things like Trileptal and Artane as well as psychedelic mushrooms and weed, and also ketamine when the psychosis was less well-controlled).

So in general I’m more prone to psychosis than the average person even with it being treated, and I’m just concerned that the hallucinogenic-like potential of Auvelity might do Bad Things™.

Is this possible and/or common? I’m seeing my psychiatrist next week to talk about starting Auvelity but in the meantime I’m trying to do as much research as I can on it.

Most people will never see anything but my blinking tic. I have friends who didn’t know I had TS until I told them and/or got comfortable enough around them to stop suppressing my tics. Most strangers or acquaintances will never know unless they catch me ticcing when I think I’m not being watched.

I think this comes from being ashamed of my tics as a child and never talking about them. I had OCD/autism traits that centered around always needing to be in control, so I didn’t let on that anything was wrong, and I was also really self-conscious and didn’t want to be judged by my peers. I suppressed my tics around doctors and teachers and then would have tic attacks later when I was alone. Along with that, my dad has Tourette’s too, so tics were just a given in my household, and my parents never bothered to get me diagnosed anyway because they were mild enough that they didn’t interfere with my life (they thought).

I didn’t start talking about my tics until I was about 17 (so around 2018) when they got severe enough that I couldn’t hide a lot of them anymore. I dropped out of high school partly because my tics were so bad. They’re milder now that I’m an adult but I still finally got a diagnosis when I was 22 and now have less (but still some) shame around them.

Still, I have not been able to unlearn the habit of suppressing them around people I don’t know well.

Can anyone relate?

I’ve always thought I had little empathy due to my autism and other neurodivergent conditions because I don’t literally feel what other people are feeling. Before I learned more about autism and got diagnosed, I thought I might be a sociopath. I’ve never related to the hyperempathetic presentation that many autistic women have. I am really bad at knowing how someone is feeling, and especially as a kid, have always felt awkward when someone is sad and I’m expected to comfort them (I just never knew what to say), so I offer advice instead, because often that’s the best I can do. I’ll also usually outright ask how someone feels about a situation so that I can better gauge how to support them.

All this to say, I thought of myself as not really having the capacity to empathize because I don’t do it the same way many autistic women do. When someone is sad I don’t feel sad with them, I just feel awkward and think I’m supposed to be doing something to fix their sadness. It also makes me a little upset, but more upset AT the person than WITH them, because I want them to stop being sad since I care about them and want them to be happy.

Today my therapist told me that I’m taking the definition of empathy too literally, and that empathy isn’t always *literally* picking up on the emotions of others and feeling the same way they do as a result. It *can* be, but isn’t always. Apparently it’s more nuanced than that. When people say empathy is “feeling what others are feeling” I assumed that just meant taking their emotions on as my own. But today what I learned from him is that empathy can just be understanding why someone is feeling a certain way and acting accordingly, which I DO sort of have the ability to do, even if I’m just guessing how to react based on past experience.

I also have a strong moral compass now that I’ve matured since adolescence and he told me that acting on my values toward others is a form of showing empathy.

So I guess it turns out that I CAN feel empathy. I know in women hyperempathy is more common because of the way we’re socialized, but I’m wondering if anyone else’s capacity for empathy presents the same way as mine.

I started taking Artane to treat antipsychotic-induced EPS (doc and I are still unsure whether it’s tardive dyskenisia or dystonia) four days ago and it’s making me so dumb.

I can’t remember conversations that’ve happened a few minutes ago, I’m having a hard time spelling things and coming up with the right words while speaking, and I forget the steps to things I do every day. I’m making so many dumb little mistakes like getting into the passenger’s seat when I’m about to drive myself somewhere and being confused about where my clothes are when I already put them in the wash. I've been diagnosed with ADHD for a little over a decade but these days I felt it was pretty well-controlled with stimulants until I started Artane. This feels like ADHD on steroids.

My Artane is also giving me brutal insomnia which doesn’t help the confusion. Yesterday and the day before, I stayed awake for 36 hours because I couldn’t make myself sleep, which compounded the confusion and made me hallucinate a lot more than usual.

With my psychiatrist’s permission I switched from taking a 2mg pill twice a day down to one pill in the morning only so that I can sleep better. Still, during the day I’d like to not be so confused.

Does this go away? Should I be concerned about this side effect?

I started taking Artane (trihexyphenidyl) two days ago to rule out tardive dyskinesia from my antipsychotic meds, one of which is Haldol. I’ve been having weird involuntary mouth/tongue movements every morning for about a month and a half and am not sure whether they’re TD or another kind of EPS like dystonia or a weird form of akathisia, or simply a recently developed mouth stim, so I’m trialing Artane to see if it gets better or worse. I’ve gotten cervical dystonia and akathisia from my Geodon before which makes me think I’m more prone to EPS than the average person.

I’m on a very low dose right now (0.5 mg in the morning and another 0.5 in the evening to begin with) but will eventually titrate up to 6 mg total.

Even on this low dose, I’ve been getting the usual side effects like mild confusion and some dizziness. But I also haven’t been hungry at all since starting it, which drugs.com says is a rarer side effect. My appetite was already poor to begin with but now it’s nonexistent. Whenever I do try to eat, I can only eat a little because I get full really quickly.

Can anyone who’s experienced this side effect chime in on how long the loss of appetite normally lasts? Does it come back?

I started taking Artane (trihexyphenidyl) two days ago to rule out tardive dyskinesia from my antipsychotic meds, one of which is Haldol. I’ve been having weird involuntary mouth/tongue movements every morning for about a month and a half and am not sure whether they’re TD or another kind of EPS or simply a new mouth stim, so I’m trialing Artane to see if it gets better or worse.

I’m on a very low dose right now (0.5 mg in the morning and another 0.5 in the evening to begin with) but will eventually titrate up to 6 mg total.

Even on this low dose, I’ve been getting the usual side effects like mild confusion and some dizziness. But I also haven’t been hungry at all since starting it, which drugs.com says is a rarer side effect. My appetite was already poor to begin with but now it’s nonexistent. Whenever I do try to eat, I can only eat a little because I get full really quickly.

Can anyone who’s experienced this side effect chime in on how long the loss of appetite normally lasts? Did your appetite ever come back?

On Spravato I often got taken through dark mental “rooms” and revisited memories and processed intrusive thoughts as they happened in real time. These sessions felt fairly intense most of the time.

My insurance changed this year and my new one doesn’t cover Spravato so I switched to a compounded nasal spray. Up until this last session the trip didn’t feel as intense, but it’s treated my depression just as effectively. During these sessions I can feel concepts in my head getting “smaller” and “darker” and I get some of the same physical effects, but most of the effects are subdued compared to the Spravato.

However, this last session I had was crazy. I felt crazy vertigo all over my body, like it was moving different directions as the rooms in my head changed dimensions. I hallucinated faces in everything when my eyes were open. I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to come out of it for about two hours. The rooms I got taken through in my head were also super vivid. I was too out of it to even HAVE intrusive thoughts at all, so I don’t think I processed through any of them. At one point the doctor came in to check on me and asked how I was doing, and I didn’t know how to form words correctly, so I think I managed to stutter out something like “I’m very tripping” and he left immediately, lol.

What makes some sessions more intense than normal? I had a bit more caffeine than usual that morning and also take Adderall so that might’ve contributed. I take magnesium glycinate supplements every night to help me sleep which I’ve read can contribute too, but it shouldn’t have made much of a difference since I have those all the time.

I’m 24 and probably developed PMOS last year when I stopped having periods, though I’ve had high testosterone for a much longer time. I’ve always been pretty hairy on my body but thought I didn’t have PMOS-level facial hair, just jawline acne as evidence of high androgens.

Lately, though, I’ve been noticing somewhat long chin and upper lip hairs, and a bunch of long cheek/sideburn hair, that have me wondering if I have hirsutism after all. It’s very light in color since I have blondish hair but it seems like I have a lot more than most women do. I don’t shave, so maybe I’m comparing myself to women who DO shave the peach fuzz off their faces though.

I can’t tell if they’re terminal or vellus hairs since they’re so light. They kind of remind me of the facial hair my brother grows (we think he likely has low testosterone so he doesn’t have very much).

Does this sound like PMOS levels of facial hair?