ADHD meds only intensified special interest- what now?

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Talk to the vision doc about the issues and the doc will tell you which ones are vision/sensory related. Vision therapy was great for us.

As explained to me by my son's psychiatrist, OCD can be repetetive thoughts that play over and over and over again, like a record skipping. Note there is a difference between OCD and OCD-type symptoms related to PDD. They are not the same thing and do not have the same cause. My son's pdoc suspected OCD and offered to treat it, pre PDD dx, but I wanted to wait and am glad I did. Stims also often look like OCD on the outside.

IMO, AD(H)D, OCD, Mood, etc...type behaviors in a person with PDD will not usually respond to treatment for those specific disorders, because they are not those disorders, they only look that way from the outside. You must find the root cause.

If you only gave him the adderall once, how can you be sure that that is what caused his increased hyperfocus?

I don't mean to be rude in asking this, and it is quite possible the two are related, but I don't know how you could know that for sure with a single dose. Maybe his hyperfocus was related to something else entirely?

My son did well on adderall. Unless the dose was too high. Then he looked spacey and had a very flat affect. But when his dose was right, it was like a miracle drug for him. It did seem to make some of his spectrummy symptoms more noticable, but not hyperfocus. His pragmatic issues and social issues seemed more noticeable, probably because they were not being covered by a flurry of activity and pressured speech.

What dose did they start him on? I started my son during Christmas break on a very low dose and very slowly increased it. It worked very well that way for us.

Not likely. They are all quite different, and different people react differently to different meds. Some medications also require some time to adjust to them. I'd suggest speaking with your son's psychiatrist about your experience thus far with Adderall and see what he/she suggests.

inthistogether-- he definitely has his special interests that he obsesses over, but I have never seen him like that... he was literally like a robot... dogs and kids running by him and it was like he did not even notice... he had his head down and built lego people for 7 hours, with no drinks and no food, and the only words out of his mouth were when I asked him a question (and he did not stop focusing on the legos to answer me, he just kept building). after the 7 hours it was like it just all the sudden stopped-- he all the sudden looked up and said, I think I am going outside now, I followed him out and we had a normal conversation... it was only 5 mg of Adderall

Wow. You need to be that specific when you talk to the doc. I would've called the next day.

I don't know how big your son is, but my son started at 2.5 mg and slowly moved up. Maybe it was too much at once? Or maybe it isn't the right med. But I will tell you, Adderall changed my son's life, so I would talk to your doctor about maybe trying a smaller dose first before you discard it after one trial. I mean, if you had given it to him twice and the exact same thing happened both times, I'd be more suspicious. But one instance of correlation does not necessarily mean causation, ykwim?

BTW, it is good to look into sensory-based treatment modalities as well, and I totally get that you'd rather not have your son on meds. I hated every day that my son took them. But I waited about 6 months too long to put him on meds out of sheer stubbornness on my part and I have regretted it since. He had 6 months of hell that he never had to experience, except for my pigheadedness.

It was 2nd grade that did him in, too. I mean, he was always a little odd and behind his peers, but somehow in 2nd grade, the slight differences became screamingly loud. Hang in there with all of this...it really does get better. He is in 6th grade now and is miles ahead of where he was.