How can I add my age to my yahoo-profile?

How helpful has ADD medication been for children who have been taking from an early age?

• I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and prescribed ADD medication throughout most of my school career. I personally hated the way ADD medication made me feel and took many different kinds, until eventually in junior year of high school I just got sick of it and my psychiatrist agreed to let me try not taking it anymore, and I haven't taken it since. I'm 21 now, I've grown up a lot since then, and my ADD has basically all but gone away, though that only happened when I stopped taking medication, so I'm still not sure whether or not it actually helped. I'm curious to see how other people with similar experiences fared.

• Answer:

  Recently the UCLA Semel Institute http://www.semel.ucla.edu/research invited education professionals and the public to a discussion of this very question. There are ongoing studies being done on this. Here is an invitation to participate: http://www.semel.ucla.edu/news/ucla-seeks-children-adhd-research-study In the lecture which I attended last autumn, the general consensus was that focus is affected positively by the ADHD medications, and that when these meds were stopped, focus reverted to its unmedicated state. The consensus did not address whether the study habits acquired during the time a student was medicated endured once the medication was stopped. My experience with families of students with ADHD, as an educational consultant to them, is that good habits and learned techniques for organizing oneself and implementing executive functioning skills learned while medicated do carry over, even when focus may not. Also: impulse control seems to become less of an issue with increasing maturity even without medication. But that is just my personal experience, observed while watching my client-students growing up...