How to get prescribed ADHD medication in the Netherlands, a guide based on real world success:
1) spend over a year repeatedly trying to tell the GP that it’s not going well and you need help. This will not cost you money, only your precious finite time on this earth. It helps if you have a husband to drag you to the doctor when you’re at your lowest and argue with them
2) finally get escalated to a psychologist who takes a few months to be sure there’s definitely something wrong. She will recommend the GP to prescribe ADHD medication
3) Your prescription mysteriously disappears into the system. After several attempts to follow up that take months, and several confused phone calls from your psychologist to the GP, it turns out the GP refuses to authorize it because *shrug* reasons. Maybe if a psychiatrist also signs off on it?
4) You attempt to get an appointment with a psychiatrist. Every psychiatrist in the Netherlands is booked until 2034.
5) Finally, after a dozen rounds of pleading and nagging, you get a mysterious phone call from an unknown number. They give you an address and tell you to be there at 7 in the evening.
6) You find yourself at the door of a historic art deco mansion in the most exclusive district of Amsterdam. There is absolutely no indication that this is a medical practice. You ring the doorbell. Nothing happens. You wait nervously, and try again.
7) The door creaks open. An elderly man wearing crocs stands before you. He silently bids you follow him up a winding staircase to a parlor filled with a thousand thick and aging books in every tongue of the earth and perhaps a few also of the angels. They concern prophecy, and music, and poetry, and the apocalypse.
8) In a thin whisper of a voice barely to be heard, he asks your name, and where you were born. He slowly, very slowly, so slowly that you think you have died and this is purgatory, types this into a computer. It is in his lap because his desk is covered with strange devices beyond identification.
9) He tells you the prescription will be ready for pickup tomorrow.
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abadidea
in reply to abadidea • • •abadidea
in reply to abadidea • • •and then the final, crucial step is to come home to Odin
abadidea
in reply to abadidea • • •amused by how many people are replying/quoting with, like "yeah it's the same here, it sucks" without commenting on the visitation from the angel attempting mortal guise
my fault for not opening with that I guess 😂
John Maxwell
in reply to abadidea • • •Snow
in reply to abadidea • • •In the United States this process is much simpler, shorter, and quicker.
1. Doctor prescribes the medication, and 2. Insurance company denies it because it's not medically necessary.
Pavel Janíček
in reply to Snow • • •Heathen 🐈
in reply to Snow • • •3. your cousin who cooks ACTUAL meth hooks you up and takes cash. (This is something a few friends have done.)
Bradalot “”
in reply to abadidea • • •Tropical Trevor
in reply to abadidea • • •Dubious Blur
in reply to abadidea • • •starkraving666
in reply to abadidea • • •Beans (Baked)
in reply to abadidea • • •fraggle
in reply to abadidea • • •Z80 Inside
in reply to abadidea • • •StoneBear
in reply to abadidea • • •Good grief. Now, let's see if the Rx actually shows up.....
(Wrestling stuff out of Dutch GPs should be an Olympic-level endurance sport... )
Fi 🏳️⚧️
in reply to abadidea • • •mcgrew
in reply to abadidea • • •🕯️Curious Magpie 🕯️
in reply to abadidea • • •Monsieur_Lepetit
in reply to abadidea • • •Also, for a country (that used to be) so liberal on drug usage, this is borderline kafkaian
Aris Adamantiadis 💲Paid
in reply to abadidea • • •Chris (Master of Potate) 🥔
in reply to abadidea • • •In Germany my mom got my diagnosis as a child and somehow I only needed to go to a neuro psychiatrist, fill out a form, get an EKG and then I got my meds. I have no idea how hard or easy it is to get that if you haven't been diagnosed yet.
Now my biggest hurdle is to get a new prescription because i have to go in person and the doctor is only there at very inconvenient times. And because it is classified as a narcotic I HAVE TO do it myself.
Raphaël V
in reply to abadidea • • •1) Go to GP, GP refers you to the own practice's mental health support employee (GGZ ondersteuner)
2) Filling in an online survey
3) Said support employee saying "you only have a score of 5 out of 6 for ADHD on the preliminary screening, I don't see a point in referring you for a formal diagnosis, you'll wait for ages and I don't believe in medication anyway"
Phil Haigh
in reply to abadidea • • •Dan Cassidy 🦌
in reply to abadidea • • •Starraven
in reply to abadidea • • •slotos
in reply to abadidea • • •Psychologist at step 2? The profession that _does not diagnose nor prescribes medicine_?
Go to Poland to get diagnosed. Ask for the diagnosis in English. Use it to skip to the end of the process in the Netherlands.
Will probably end up saving money that way.
Kyle Memoir 🍉🐧
in reply to abadidea • • •Infosec StuC
in reply to abadidea • • •IcooIey
in reply to abadidea • • •StarkRG
in reply to abadidea • • •Tuvix was framed
in reply to abadidea • • •Flaming Cheeto
in reply to abadidea • • •NosirrahSec 🏴☠️ guillotine enthusiast
in reply to abadidea • • •Sensitive content
I am so sorry this is what you have to go through.
It's a similar tale over here in the U.S., but to varying degrees in some pain points than others.
Douglas
in reply to abadidea • • •Kat S
in reply to abadidea • • •An encounter with the Dutch medical system that doesn't feature being fobbed off with paracetomol?
Nela
in reply to abadidea • • •I guess the moral of the story is that persistence is the only way to achieve anything medically in this country and that the only accepted currency is time x_x
Heathers the Hierophant
in reply to abadidea • • •I managed to get a psychologist's diagnosis of ADHD in Germany in a walk-in session, no appointment, completely by luck and partly because the online form he usually gives as a preliminary is in German, and I don't down German very well, so he did the assessment then and there in English. That was in 2022.
Since then I've made a few attempts at getting a referral from my GP to bring to a prescribing psychiatrist, but I have yet to find one who is taking new patients and the German medic system is confusing to me.
Also, I'm anyway a bit nervous about taking those medications because I've a history of addiction issues with meth/amphetamine...
Gin Kangaroo
in reply to abadidea • • •@confluency This sounds very close to my experience. Especially the 'all psychiatrists booked up' thing. Even with a pre-existing diagnosis, it took 3 full years to get into the queue for getting a medication prescription.
Does ADHD centraal still exist? It was a private facility that did a kind of 1 stop diagnosis and medication shop, but was seen as purely money making and medically dodgy. I never went but did recommend to parents of already diagnosed kids a few times.
1/2
Jen
in reply to abadidea • • •Victoria Walberg
in reply to abadidea • • •SecondUniverse (she/her/they)
in reply to abadidea • • •Matt Cengia
in reply to abadidea • • •