I know that some people find great improvement from medications. Each child is so very different that it is hard to know.
Our personal experience was horrific, from both Concerta and from Zoloft (which is an SSRI for anxiety). The personality changes that occurred with these medicines were frightening. My brother-in-law, who has a PhD. in psychology, also tried Concerta for his son for ADHD symptoms. He was alarmed enough to stop the medicine after just 3 days.
Epoh: You are the best person to know if your son is worse or better when on the Concerta or the mood stabilizer. I'm assuming that you tried the meds because of some issue that you were having. But did the tantrums get worse on the meds?
The question that I have is when is your son calm and happy? That was easy for us to find because it all centered around a bad fit for school. If your son feels a lack of power or respect in one aspect of his life, it will start affecting his interactions with everyone, particular in a safe environment like home. My DS could hold it together, mostly, at school, but we were his safety valve at home where everything began to blow. Power struggles and tantrums can often be a call for help that he feels powerless in some aspect of his life.
Can you find a way to get him out of meltdown mode when he is in it? For us, the overly authoritarian approach, which unfortunately they tried with threatening him, always backfired and made things escalate. We always found that when our DS was getting upset and very anxious, that we could get him to "think" his way out of the state. I remember him getting very upset about something being unfair when he was about 8, and we started a long discussion about life being unfair, which for some reason lead to the election between Al Gore and George Bush of all things. I think I was trying to show him that even adults who have power and authority can sometime feel that life is unfair. Somehow engaging his brain about the Electoral College and its role in electing a President completely defused his emotions. Within a few minutes, he was completely calm, and we had an hour long discussion about politics. We still laugh about that today. When he was undergoing allergy testing and was completely phobic of needles, we had him find the prime numbers to 100.
I don't know if any of this help? It is so hard when each child is so different!!
