FOR Devin Barclay, life with attention-deficit disorder has been a winding road. And seven years after he quit taking medication for the condition, "it's still winding," he says with a laugh.
But as the 23-year-old navigates his way into adulthood, he's managed to pay the roadside distractions a little less attention. And he's learned a thing or two about getting himself from one destination to the next without taking major detours.
In 1990, when Barclay was 7, he was diagnosed with ADD and began taking Ritalin -- a stimulant medication that he and his parents referred to as "the thinking pill" -- to help him sit still and pay attention in class. Over the next decade, almost 2 million American boys and girls were similarly diagnosed, an unprecedented growth of a medical condition that, before 1990, had been so rarely recognized that the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not even track it.
Today, the children on the leading edge of a wave dubbed by some "the ADD generation" have reached the cusp of adulthood. And as they take on jobs or college, care for themselves away from home, enter into adult relationships and become parents, these newly minted grown-ups are carrying out a massive natural experiment.
It seems like only yesterday they were fidgeting in their seats, sprinting around their classrooms and daydreaming their way through addition and subtraction. Most, just like Barclay, struggled through elementary and middle school on Ritalin as the practice of medicating attention problems in children took off steeply in the United States: Between 1990 and 2005, production of the two stimulant compounds most used to treat ADD -- methylphenidate and amphetamine -- increased seventeenfold and thirtyfold, respectively.
Now many are choosing to do without the drugs that profoundly affected their experience of childhood and school and, in many cases, made it possible for them to learn alongside other kids in mainstream classrooms.
It is one of the first decisions of their adult lives. Mostly, it was parents who dictated whether and when they would start medications to sharpen their focus. But the decision to stay on or go off these drugs is one that these teens and young adults have made for themselves -- with little research to guide them.
Whether the results will be momentous or slight will be more than a personal test for each of them; it is uncharted terrain, also, to researchers in the field of attention problems who are watching intently for answers -- and hoping for better guidance for future generations of ADD sufferers.
