Has anyone been misdiagnosed as adhd?
TW for drug use
Sorry if this isn’t allowed. Please direct me to the correct subreddit to post this to if it isn’t appropriate here because I truly need support right now.
I’ll begin with my experience in taking Zoloft while not on any other medications.
March 2025, I started taking Zoloft. I hadn’t done any research on bipolar prior to this. Within days I became extremely euphoric. I started bettering my life. I got maybe an average of 4-6 hours of sleep, sometimes staying up for 48 hours straight. I spent 4 hours one day cleaning and organizing my room. I lost 50 pounds in about 3 months from tracking calories and walking around 5 miles every day.
I told both my therapist and my psychiatrist how happy I was, how I never in my life experienced this much happiness and I felt unstoppable. They both said they were extremely happy for me.
At some point, my boyfriend at the time did something horrible to me and I broke up with him and he moved out of my house. I began spiraling after this. (Not sure how much this actually has to factor in with my experience, but I will include the next portion anyway. It will be everything inside of the brackets.)
[The night we broke up, we smoked together. And for the first time I had a horrible experience smoking. I had a panic attack and thought I was going into cardiac arrest.
My ex still lived with my brother, his girlfriend and I for 2 weeks before being able to move out. During this time I usually would sleep at my mom’s house or at a man’s house to be away from him. But I still went home to change clothes or whatever else I did in my free time and I realized that my brother and his girlfriend were constantly hanging out with my ex. I spoke to my brother about this and he basically without saying the actual words, said that they did not believe me and that my ex told a different story.]
After my ex moved out, it seemed like things only got worse. I started sleeping with multiple different people multiple times a week. I more than doubled my body count in a month. One week I slept with a new person every single day. I began doing different drugs with men I had just met.
2 months after the break up, I got into a relationship with my boyfriend, who I am still with now. About a month into our relationship I went to a rave with a couple of friends and ended up doing a drug that rhymes with “beth.”
[While still at the rave, I convinced myself my friends were plotting to rob me, steal my car, and kill me. I abandoned them at a random gas station in New Orleans at 2 am and called my mom and drove home 2 hours away. I stayed awake for 48 hours straight while my mom had to force me to eat and drink water. I was in full psychosis from the beth. When I finally slept and woke up, I had over 200 videos on my phone filming down the hallway, out windows, behind furniture. Me hiding behind furniture. I also convinced myself that my boyfriend was in on it as well.]
Before 2025, I would have never slept with as many people as I did. I would have never did the drugs that I did. The things I did, the things I said, the way I acted, it was all very unlike me. And my mother noticed this and pointed this out as well.
This year I found out about bipolar and the symptoms. I found out about how Zoloft affects it and I ended up getting a psychiatrist and told him all of the above, as well as earlier signs from a few years prior, how I felt that my mood often cycled between feeling unstoppable and feeling hopeless.
I want to mention that I do not doubt his knowledge as a psychiatrist, I know that I am not a medical professional.
He told me that since bipolar is extremely overdiagnosed, he was instead going to put me on adderall for adhd. I then began increasing my own dosage over time and feeling the same euphoric state that I had last year.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
Posted Jul 6, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC