<p>From someone who is gifted and has ADD I would take him off the meds. I started taking ADD meds my Junior year of High School. At first nothing worked. We tried Ritalin, Vyvanse, Focalin, EVERYTHING. The one that did help me focus was Adderal XR. While Adderall did help me focus, they made me very moody and anxious, like your son. Hopefully you'll be able to find the right dosage and medication for your son. </p>
<p>However, if your son is like me where unless the medication is super powerful he feels no effects at all it isn't the end of the world. I just finished my Freshman year of college and I still take the Adderall, but I usually save it for times when I just extremely slammed with work i.e. midterms, finals, etc.. This seems to work pretty well. I was at the top of almost all of my classes both semesters last year.</p>
<p>Also, I have just a basic college suggestion. I went to a gifted high school, and we had a sizeable number of kids with ADD/ADHD/Aspergers. The biggest problem with most of the kids (the school had a manditory "support group" that made us meet together once a week after school and talk about our "medical problems") was that they couldn't focus unless the subject interested them. After the first year in college, I noticed a lot of kids, including myself, were really helped by a liberal arts colleges. What I've noticed is that small-medium sized liberal arts schools generally have less requirements than big colleges and some of them such as Pitzer, New College of Florida, Oberlin, Amherst, Bard have an open curriculum with no requirements. Because these schools had less requirements my friends were able to take only classes that interested them. My friends with ADD felt less "handicapped" at these schools because they were always interested in what they were studying.</p>
<p>Also, I've notices the smaller schools tended to have more individualized student attention, so if a student is having problems it won't go by unnoticed. Several of my friends with learning disabilities who went to big universities like Berkeley or Georgetown didn't do as well as they did in high school because the classes were big and they had trouble concentrating in a lecture hall with 150 other students. Also, when they tried to get help from the administration they often complained about getting "lost in the system".</p>