This article from The LA Times, reprinted in The Hartford Courant, talks about the long-range picture for children who take Ritalin and other drugs for ADHD.

The most surprising quote from the article for me is below. As prelude, Barclay is a 23 year old male interviewed for the article, who decided to stop taking medication for ADD as an adult.

He has no interest in going back. The symptoms that first prompted his parents to put him on Ritalin when he was 7 – the nonstop physical drive, the impulsiveness, the inability to focus in school – have abated with age, he says. A stubborn restlessness of mind remains, but the ADD has changed, and so has he. Adult life has a wider range of choices than grade school offered. He hopes that if he makes the right ones, he can make it all work.

Barclay has plenty of company, says Mariellen Fischer, a professor of neurology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Among the roughly 150 children she has tracked well into their 20s, “discontinuation of the medication (has been) by far the vast norm,” she said. Of those diagnosed and medicated for ADD as children, she estimates, about 9 in 10 are off those medications by the time they reach 21.

I don’t know if research with larger sample sizes bears this out, but if it does, if 9 out of 10 young adults do not continue taking medication for ADHD as adults, what is this telling us? Primarily to me, the indication seems to be that young adults do not want to continue to have medication affect them the way it did in childhood.

The article also raises other questions, though less overtly. I came away with questions not just about what happens when children on psychotropic medication become adults (e.g., do they “age out” of medication, how are their needs and issues different, are they still “disordered,” etc.) but whether there is an implication that the psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of children is rife with error or at least off the mark at times (as evidenced by the abatement or alteration of symptoms in adulthood). I came away wondering (for the millionth time) if more care needs to be taken before attaching a label such as ADHD (or, of course, Bipolar Disorder) on a child and putting them on meds.