Split personalities

I think the hardest thing to deal with in the realm of Oldest's ADHD is his split personalities.

He came home from school perfectly fine.
It was a beautiful day, so I sent them all outside to play with friends.
He came home happy and just fine.
I called him downstairs to do homework while I made dinner. He hasn't turned in many math assignments.

What followed was nearly 2 hours of sulking, swearing (spelled and whispered, by him, not me), and many many "I am stupid!" exclamations. He was in one of his classic funks, that thankfully have been rare recently. He turns from sulky to angry to destructive.

He starting tearing apart a wooden model he received and made for Christmas. I made a mistake here and stopped him. He fought and I ended up pinning him to the floor again. I hate doing that, and I usually end up doing it if I'm worried about him hurting himself. He wasn't hurting himself in this case. I was wrong. After he chose to return to his seat at the table, I didn't stop him from destroying the model again (and he did totally dismantle it). We had a very long discussion (mostly of him yelling "I'm stupid" and "I'm a waste of space!" and us presenting every line of encouragement and argument we could come up with.

Eventually, he left the table and went to the bathroom. When he came back, he was himself again. I could here it in his voice immediately. Gone was the sulky angry attitude. Suddenly he was cooperative, apologetic, and finished off his homework fine.

I just have to keep asking myself Why? Why on earth did we react? I know perfectly well that he'll come back to himself eventually and that he'll fight endlessly until that little switch flips in his head.

I guess on the bright side, we did discover that he does much better on story problems when he can talk through them. He's reading them just fine, he just doesn't process the information very well in his head. As soon as he says the problem out loud and talks through what it's asking, he does just fine.

Just another day in our lives...