ADHD-Informed Care: Why Most Therapists Aren’t Trained and What I Learned Teaching Them

Most therapists receive less than one hour of ADHD training in graduate school, yet 6% of U.S. adults (about 1 in 15 people) live with ADHD.

As an ADHD specialist and trainer, I’ve learned firsthand how unprepared most clinicians feel, and how deeply this affects the clients who come to us for help.

This is what ADHD informed care really looks like, and why it is urgently needed.

My ADHD Training Work Started as Something Personal

I didn’t start teaching ADHD informed care because it sounded interesting. I started because no one knew how to help my 6-year-old.

We were struggling, and every provider (well meaning as they were) kept missing what ADHD looked like in real life. I walked away from appointment after appointment feeling like I was failing my child.

And then I began hearing the exact same stories from clients:

“Yes, I’ve done therapy before but it didn’t help.”
“I was misdiagnosed for years.”
“They told me it wasn’t ADHD, I just needed to try harder.”
“I left therapy feeling more shame than when I walked in.”
“No one explained what ADHD actually meant for me.”

It didn’t matter if someone was diagnosed at age 8 or age 45. The pattern was the same:

• No real tools
  
• No ADHD specific support
  
• Very little validation

Not because therapists don’t care, but because they were never trained in ADHD the way they are in anxiety and depression. And the data backs this up.

ADHD Is One of the Most Common Diagnoses We See and One of the Least Taught

According to the CDC in 2023, 6% of U.S. adults have ADHD, roughly 1 in 15 people. That means most therapists already have ADHD clients on their caseload every single week.

Yet most therapists were taught almost nothing about:

• adult ADHD
  
• emotional dysregulation
  
• executive dysfunction
  
• ADHD masking
  
• trauma layering
  
• identity impacts
  
• culturally responsive ADHD care

A national clinician knowledge study showed:

• 45% correctly understood the real world burden of adult ADHD
  
• 41% correctly understood diagnostic criteria, prevalence, and screening
  
• 49% understood available therapies

Not just therapists; these numbers include clinicians such as psychiatrists, pediatricians, and nurse practitioners.

This isn’t a therapist problem. It’s a training system problem.

We’re asking clinicians to support a huge neurodivergent population with a tiny fraction of the information they need.

What I Learned While Teaching ADHD Informed Care

When I began training clinicians, I expected to teach frameworks and clinical tools.

What I didn’t expect was this:

Therapists often miss the core ADHD experience because the system we were trained in was built on outdated models — models normed on white, hyperactive little boys, not on adults, not on women, and not on people of color.

Most programs still focus on:

• hyperactivity in children
  
• inattention checklists
  
• Surface-level symptom lists

But not:

• emotional intensity
  
• years of shame
  
• chronic masking
  
• perfectionism and anxiety
  
• executive dysfunction
  
• trauma interplay
  
• cultural and gender differences
  
• identity loss and missed potential

And when clinicians finally learn the full picture, everything shifts.

Small Shifts Create Huge Results

One of the biggest lessons I teach is that ADHD care doesn’t require complicated treatment models.

It requires clarity and compassion.

Small shifts can make a huge difference:

• Naming the actual executive function barrier
  
• Understanding why “try harder” increases shame
  
• Breaking tasks into one more step
  
• Slowing down the pace for processing
  
• Validating instead of minimizing
  
• Integrating culture, trauma history, and identity
  
• Understanding how emotions and ADHD function together

To clinicians, these changes seem small. To an ADHD client who has spent 20 to 40 years feeling broken, they are life changing.

What Grad School Never Told Us

ADHD isn’t too complicated to treat. It is simply severely under taught.

Most ADHD clients walk into therapy carrying:

• decades of shame
  
• years of masking
  
• multiple misdiagnoses
  
• coping skills that never fit their brain
  
• intense grief for the life they should have had
  
• a deep belief that they were the problem

They weren’t the problem. Their clinicians just weren’t given the education.

A Training for Therapists Who Want to Change That

This is why I’m building an ADHD training program that goes deeper than symptoms and DSM criteria. It’s designed to help therapists:

• understand ADHD as a lived experience
  
• apply trauma aware, culturally responsive care
  
• use neurodivergent affirming language
  
• support executive function in practical, realistic ways
  
• integrate real world interventions clients actually use
  
• practice compassion over perfectionism

If you want to feel confident and prepared working with ADHD clients, and finally get the training we should have received in graduate school, I’d love to invite you to join the list.

? Join the ADHD Therapist Training Interest List here.