Our Story

I’m Dr. Marcy Caldwell, and I founded The Center for ADHD — though, honestly, “founded” makes it sound more deliberate than it was. ADHD was a specialty that found me, not the other way around.

I didn’t set out to build a career around it. People with ADHD simply kept finding their way into my office — many already sensing that something about how their mind worked was making life harder than it needed to be. They weren’t confused about that. What they didn’t have was someone who could help them understand it and actually work with it.

Neither, at first, did I. When I trained in the early 2000s, ADHD was barely on the curriculum — certainly not the adult, emotional, lived-in version of it I was seeing every day. So I learned the way that mattered most: from the people in front of me, who trusted me with what it actually felt like to live inside their own heads. What stayed with me wasn’t the diagnosis — it was watching person after person work so hard, and feel so capable, and still not be able to reach the life they wanted, simply because no one had ever helped them understand their own mind.

Understanding what they were up against didn’t tell me how to help, though, and they deserved more than my care. So I went looking for the rest — the training and supervision my graduate program never offered, the research, the years of practice — until I could actually give them what they came for.

As word got out, my waitlist grew faster than I could keep up with — and because, at the time, very few people were doing this work, I had nowhere to send those I couldn’t see myself. So I started training more clinicians. That is how The Center for ADHD was born— not as a business plan, but as an answer to more need than one person could meet. We’ve grown organically ever since, and every clinician who’s joined has brought their own perspective, lived experience, and specialty, which makes us better at recognizing how differently ADHD can show up. This isn’t a community we study from the outside. It’s one we’re part of.

Today, The Center for ADHD focuses exclusively on ADHD in adults. Most of our work is ongoing therapy and coaching — the day-to-day work of helping people understand their mind and build a life that fits it — alongside the assessments that often start someone on that path. Because ADHD rarely travels alone, we look at the whole picture: anxiety, depression, sleep, learning differences, relationships, other diagnoses, and the different identities people carry. The answers, tools, and strategies you leave with are ones you can actually use in daily life. And because we know how often ADHD gets missed — in women, in high achievers, in marginalized communities, and in anyone whose symptoms were mistaken for something else — we’re able to recognize it where more general care often doesn’t.

What we believe is simple: ADHD isn’t a flaw to fix or a character problem to push through. It’s a different way of being wired, with real difficulty and real gifts — and everyone living with it deserves to understand their own mind, set down the shame, and learn to work with it instead of against it. That conviction runs through everything I do here, and through my writing in The New York Times, HuffPost, ADDitude, and Psychology Today, and my book Unstuck, about why ADHD makes small emotional moments feel enormous and what actually helps. You can read more about my own path to this work — and why it’s personal to me — on my site.

If you’ve spent years sensing that something’s been missed, you’re exactly who we built this for.