Wow, they still prescribe ritalin?!? That stuff is awful!
I took it for a year or so, almost 15 years ago. The longer I took it, the more wierd side effects I had. And boy did the addiction take hold in a hurry... I NEEDED my ritalin!
So a couple of things I noticed that helped me decide to get rid of it completely. First of all, one of the scariest wierd side effects was a sleep disturbance. I would fall asleep, stop breathing and then wake up gasping for air... over and over, all night long. It was horrible and scary, and it was caused by the ritalin.
Also, I was supposedly taking ritalin to help with schoolwork, right? Well whenever I took the stuff I sure put my head down and worked hard. But the work was not good. For example, I needed to write a paper for a geology class, so I popped a ritalin and set about writing. An hour or so later when it wore off, I had written 6 pages typed. I read through it and what I had written was incoherent and nonsensical. Not one bit of it made a lick of sense. So how, exactly, is that helping?
So I stopped taking it. The cravings were bad, and it was REALLY hard to force myself to work on anything at all for weeks. But it did pass, and my work got back to normal. In fact, I accomplished a lot more without it after a while.
One thing I found that helped the cravings for me was citrus fruits. I don't know why it helped, but it did. Maybe it'll help you too.
-Goat