People share experiences about Melatonin, used as treatment for people with ADHD, to help them sleep better through the night.  Also a warning about serious side-effects from herbal remedies.

Natural Alternatives for ADHD

Please note that melatonin is available in health food stores in the U.S. but appears to be on prescription-only in many other countries.

Mrs. N. from Canada wrote to us saying:
"Hi, I have followed your web site for many years now and am impressed by your efforts to educate people in the UK on ADD and ADHD.

While I live in Canada, I am originally from England and as the mother of a 13 year old ADD boy I have found it difficult to explain to my family in the UK the challenges and problems in raising an ADD child, as for many years very little was known about ADD in England and they still tend to be much more skeptical about its existence. Amazingly, I had a conversation with my 70 year old mother in England on the phone yesterday who was telling me about a policeman she knows who is distraught about the problems with his 10 year old son who has recently been diagnosed with ADD and my mother suddenly felt the urge to tell him she knows all about ADD as her grandson has it and went on to tell him all about our struggles. Amazing! because for years, her and my father's family, and for that matter much of my family's attitude was: "all he needs is a good hiding" and "it's because you raised him in Canada".

My son was diagnosed with ADD at 6.5 years of age but I had long known there was a problem since he was 4 and began seeking answers from medical professionals when his impulsive and attention seeking behaviours were creating problems at home and at nursery school. Like you, I became a avid researcher and read everything I could find on ADD. I wanted to prove more than anything, that my son did not have this disorder as I wanted it to be something I could fix. When I started reading the genetics of ADD, I sent all the information to my parents and my mother-in-law to see if anyone else in the family had had these problems. My mother quickly came back and said no and my mother-in-law said everything on the DSM list applied to my brother-in-law (my son's paternal uncle).  We then looked at the adult criteria for ADD and realised that my father-in-law was classic ADD.  Going back further, we suspect that his mother (my son's great grandmother) was also ADD as she was a very memorable women!! All of a sudden, some of father-in-law's bizarre and impulsive behaviours were explained.

As soon as I found the genetic link, I knew this was time to stop denying the fact that my son had inherited this disorder. As time passed, he displayed such similar characteristics to his uncle and grandfather, one of the most trying being the inability to sleep - he would not go to bed and came alive at 11 o'clock at night. Some nights, he would still be walking around at 2.00 am and would wake us to tell us he cannot get to sleep!!. He seldom if ever went to sleep before midnight/1.00 a.m. Worse still, he could not get out of bed in the morning - "zombie like" does not begin to describe the way he was every time I got him up for school.  I have had to literally lift him out of bed every school day.  He would stay in bed till noon if left.  Because he was only getting 5 - 6 hours sleep a night from the age of 8 - 13, he was constantly cranky and irritable in the morning which combined with other ADD symptoms made the morning time a real challenge. The Dexedrine he was taking also exacerbated his sleep problems, although we discovered that even during the long 10 week summer break he still did not sleep and he was not taking Dexedrine at all during the time he was off school. We knew anyway the sleep problem was there long before he was diagnosed with ADD and long before he took medication for it.

I vividly remember my father in law being like this - he would stay up till all hours watching television and most nights he would fall asleep on the settee with the television blaring until he woke up freezing and would then go to bed - he just hated going to bed when there was something on the TV or something going on. My brother in law too - could not get out of bed or get going in the morning but came alive at 11.00 p.m and wanted to go out and do things. For six years he worked a night shift job and loved being up all night and sleeping all day - he said it suited him to the ground as he did not like going to bed at night. (the power of genetics!!)

After years of this my husband and I were tired of not being able to get to sleep at night because our son would be in and out of the bathroom, fridge, cupboards and lights on all over the place which meant we were getting less sleep than him. Our son is very fortunate to have as his doctor Canada's leading authority on ADD, she has conducted the longest research studies on ADD children over a 30 year period and followed them into adulthood so was very aware of the problems of inability to sleep. Her daughter is also a doctor specialising in treating children with ADD and was undergoing a study on the effects/benefits of using Melatonin to aid sleep for these children. The initial results have been very promising and on the doctors advice we agreed to try it. You cannot buy melatonin in Canada but you are allowed to travel into the US to purchase it where it is sold in health stores and pharmacies and a prescription is not required. Living close to the US border we were able to do this and bring in 3 months supply. You cannot give melatonin to children under 12. Melatonin is released naturally in the body as the light changes - it is natures way of regulating sleep - the darker it gets the more melatonin is released which brings on the feeling of tiredness and desire to sleep. We were convinced our son was devoid of this natural substance so were keen to introduce it to him!!

He has been taking one tablet at night for the past 6 weeks and the results have been amazing - for the first time ever since he was a baby he has gone to bed on his own as he is tired. We have never had a situation at night where he has not been up when we are ready to go to bed and where we have not had to nag and cajole him into going to bed. Now he his happy to go to bed and the difference in demeanor is amazing. He has been a lot calmer, not as cranky, reactive or emotional, he even gets out of bed on his own at the weekends as he wakes up on his own. Even his teachers have commented that it is less disruptive and more attentive. School mornings are not as stressful - I still have to drag him out of bed but he is certainly in a better mood when I do it as he has usually had a good 9 hours sleep by then. He loves the fact that he is tired at night as he told me he did not know what being tired felt like!! For years we had him swimming and biking and doing Tae kwon do at night in the hope it would tire him out but nothing worked.