I am a person who takes ADHD medication *with* a prescription. I also take a variety of nootropics because I am, for the first time in my life since getting a diagnosis a few years back, in a position to play "catch-up" with my peers in terms of having a career and cleaning up two decade's worth of personal disorganization. Which makes this thread interesting to me. I take the stimulant ADHD meds for ADHD, which brings me to a baseline, but nootropics really help me to use information I learned (in an essentially random order) before all this began. As all of the nootropics I take are over-the-counter and considered reasonably safe, many of my friends have tried them at various points out of curiosity. I think that I can safely say at this point that they're not particularly recreational or habit-forming. Most people don't like them, and aren't interested in taking them a second time. From my perspective - because I sort of fixate on the differences between myself and neurologically dissimilar people - it seems that people have attention spans all over the spectrum. No one at either of the ends of the scale is particularly "normal", which makes sense. Unless you're self-medicating for undiagnosed ADD or ADHD, however, stimulants don't seem to work that well for people after a short while. Frankly, it's probably wreaking havoc on your circadian rhythms either way, which I'm not all that comfortable with. I don't take a stimulant because I *want* to - it scares the hell out of me half the time if I really start thinking about it. I take it because I am not functional without it. Or perhaps more to the point, because I was not functional *before* it.

I didn't realize my old account had expired. Damn, I'd had that since 2003. Anyway, I logged in to mod this one up and that started this entire debacle. Must have been quite some time since I was inspired to log in instead of just reading anonymously.