I have close family that has recently gone on medication for ADHD. So, grains of salt flying everywhere. That person is now a different person than before. Some good things, some bad. I want to stress that my family member is very accomplished and has now started to medicate (under MD supervision), after completing a PhD in STEM from a top 25 school with many honors. The good things are that they are calmer and easie…
If you can complete a PhD do you really need meds?
If the PHD was the thing you could hyperfocus on, because reasons ... you could still fight with i.e. paying your utilities late because ADHD made it that you just didn't and then there was a pile of stuff and you didn't want to deal with that pile even more ... I am on meds for last 6 months and the feeling of "oh, I can just make myself do things, no big deal" for the first week of medication was wonderful. Honeyoon period is now over, but it is still nice...
Like, I turned to psychiatric help, because in that year before I got medication I didn't do anything at work ... didn't click with a new team, I think. I have ~successfully worked as a dev for 10 years and have masters in computer science. Was lucky. I realised this was probably first year I was working on a thing I didn't care about. But afterwards I had many realisations like "normal people don't account for late-fees in their budget, they just pay on time" ...