Thanks for sharing your experience. Really valuable to me and many others on here. A question and a quibble if that's OK:
> what the medication is doing is strengthening the neural connections, so that executive function becomes a habit, to the point where you don't need it. If you do it right 50% of people with ADHD won't need it.
I had understood that this only applied to children who are young enough to have developmental neuroplasticity. Is your understanding different? Appreciate your steer as it sounds like something you have understood in more detail than me.
Quibble:
> people with real ADHD
I don't think you mean to, but this is a little clumsy. As you say in the previous sentence, ADHD is a wide spectrum. You can have ADHD but function, there is no "real" ADHD, only various degrees of severity.
From what I understand, the brain never loses its neuroplasticity, but early intervention is always better. You hear stories of people who got diagnosed as adults, got the right medication and therapy and their lives improved tremendously. Again I want to stress that it is a combination of medication and behavioral changes. For a child, it means a lot of repetitive suggestions, patience and accommodations at home and school.
For adults, I've heard Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and meditation working well.
When I said "real ADHD" I was responding to the earlier comment, where the person was trying to say how ADHD is some kind of superpower, and there are a lot of folks I hear say they have ADHD when they clearly do not. It is a large spectrum, but even folks at the lower end of the spectrum find it really hard to function. To give you an example, my son would be at the lower end of the spectrum, but we saw him struggling as he started elementary school. We were less worried about academics, but we started noticing that he was losing confidence because his peers would get what the teacher said while he did not. And, all that was leading to a loss in confidence.We read a ton of books, tried behavioral changes and recommended suggestions before we tried medication. And it simply did not work. We tried 3-4 different medications before one worked with no effects. It was a painful and heartbreaking journey. And our psychiatrist told us we were right to intervene early, because once the kids get to 3rd grade, the academic pressure increases and they are already behind their peers. I recommend Russell Barkley's you tube videos, they are excellent, and really helped me understand what ADHD is.
> what the medication is doing is strengthening the neural connections, so that executive function becomes a habit, to the point where you don't need it. If you do it right 50% of people with ADHD won't need it.
I had understood that this only applied to children who are young enough to have developmental neuroplasticity. Is your understanding different? Appreciate your steer as it sounds like something you have understood in more detail than me.
Quibble:
> people with real ADHD
I don't think you mean to, but this is a little clumsy. As you say in the previous sentence, ADHD is a wide spectrum. You can have ADHD but function, there is no "real" ADHD, only various degrees of severity.