The CDC’s national survey work has put the share of US children ever diagnosed with ADHD at roughly one in nine, and adult diagnoses have climbed steadily alongside it. That number is why editors now get a dozen ADHD pitches a week, and it is also why almost all of them get deleted. A beat that busy stops rewarding enthusiasm and starts rewarding provenance.
A press release for ADHD coaches has to clear a bar that a press release for, say, a productivity consultant does not. You are writing next to a clinical subject without clinical credentials, in a period when newsrooms have been burned by exactly that combination. The seven fixes below are the difference between a release that reads as a source and one that reads as a risk.
Start with the fact, not the philosophy
The first sentence decides everything and most ADHD coaches spend it on belief.
“I believe ADHD is a difference, not a deficit” is a position, not news, and every editor covering this beat has received it four hundred times. Open instead with something that happened, something you counted, or something that changed. A waiting list length at a local assessment service. A pattern in the referrals you receive. A policy change in your county’s schools. A date.
The philosophy still goes in, and it goes in your quote, where a reporter can attribute it to you and where it belongs. Keeping belief and fact in separate parts of the document is the cleanest signal you can send that you know the difference between the two.
Watch for the softer version of this mistake, which is opening with a description of ADHD itself. The reporter knows what ADHD is. The reader knows what ADHD is. A paragraph explaining it reads as padding at best and as condescension at worst, and it pushes your actual finding below the fold of the email preview where nobody will see it.
Why does an editor treat ADHD coaching carefully?
Because the gap between what coaching legitimately does and what a headline can imply is enormous, and the editor carries that risk, not you.
ADHD coaching is unlicensed in every US state. There is no board, no protected title, and no legal barrier to anyone printing business cards tomorrow. Plenty of excellent practitioners work in that space and the absence of regulation is not an accusation against them, but it does mean an editor has no external body to check you against. They are assessing you from the document alone.
So they read for tells. Does this person conflate coaching with therapy? Do they describe outcomes in clinical language? Do they use the word “treatment” anywhere? Do they mention medication in a way that sounds like a comparison? Is there a real human with clinical accountability anywhere in this story, or is it one unregulated practitioner making claims about a diagnosed condition?
Pass those checks and you are through. Fail one and the release is spiked in seconds, without a reply, and often with your address quietly filtered for next time.
There is a second reason for the caution, and it is more sympathetic than the first. ADHD has become a public argument. Whether diagnosis rates reflect better recognition or overdiagnosis, whether adult self-diagnosis is valid, whether social platforms have distorted how people understand the condition: all of these are live disputes with real researchers on both sides and a lot of heat around them. A reporter picking up your release inherits that argument. They will not do it for a source who seems unaware the argument exists.
So show that you know. One sentence acknowledging the contested ground, placed early, does more for your credibility than three paragraphs of enthusiasm. It also protects you, because a release that sails past the controversy invites a reporter to write the controversy into the piece with you as the example of someone who ignored it.
The practical version of this: never describe the rise in diagnoses as straightforwardly good or straightforwardly alarming. Describe what you observe in the people who reach you, and let the reporter place it in the larger fight.
The Claim Ladder
Here is the framework I hand ADHD coaches before they write anything. I call it the Claim Ladder, and it has four rungs.
The bottom rung is description: what you observed, stated as observation. “Twenty-two of my last thirty adult clients arrived within a year of a late diagnosis.” Safe, printable, and more interesting than most coaches think.
The second rung is pattern: what the observation suggests, hedged honestly. “That timing suggests people are looking for structure in the months right after diagnosis, when clinical follow-up is often thinnest.”
The third rung is recommendation: what you would do about it, scoped to your actual practice. “We front-load the first six weeks with environment changes rather than goal setting, because nothing sticks until the environment stops fighting the person.”
The top rung is causation, and you do not climb it. “Coaching reduces ADHD symptoms” is a clinical claim, it requires evidence you do not have, and it is the sentence that ends your relationship with a publication.
Write your release on rungs one through three and put the most interesting rung-two sentence in the headline. Every coach I have watched do this has been surprised by how much room there is below the ceiling. The restraint reads as expertise, because the practitioners who actually know this field are the ones most careful about what they claim.
The ladder has a useful side effect beyond safety. Coaches who write to rung two consistently end up saying more interesting things than coaches who reach for rung four, because “coaching reduces symptoms” is a sentence a hundred people have already published and “people arrive about the diagnosis and stay about the kitchen” is not. Restriction produces specificity. The claims you are allowed to make turn out to be the ones worth reading.
It also gives you a clean way to handle the question every ADHD coach dreads, which is what makes you different from a therapist. Answer on rung one. Describe what happens in a session, what you ask a client to do between sessions, what you measure, and where you stop and refer. Nobody who hears that concrete a description confuses it with therapy, and you never had to make a claim about either profession to draw the line.
Write the headline an editor could run unchanged
Your headline is not a teaser. It is a draft of theirs, and the closer it is to runnable, the less friction stands between you and a yes.
That means no colons doing heavy lifting, no questions, no cleverness, and no branding. State the finding and where it came from, in under twelve words, in the present tense. “Adults seek ADHD coaching within a year of late diagnosis, practice data shows.” A subeditor can put that on a page without touching it.
Then look at it and ask whether it would still be interesting if your name were not attached. If the answer is no, the headline is about you and needs to be about the finding. This one test catches more dead releases than any other, and it takes four seconds.
Put the date and the geography in the headline when either is genuinely part of the story, and leave both out when they are not. Local outlets need a place to hang a story and national ones need a reason it is not local, so the same finding often needs two headlines and two emails. Writing both takes ten minutes and roughly doubles your usable list.
One formatting note that sounds trivial and is not: send the headline in the subject line of your email, word for word, with nothing added. No “Story idea,” no “Press release,” no company name in brackets. Editors scan subject lines for a story and add the framing themselves. Anything in front of the finding pushes it out of the preview pane.
Every press release for ADHD coaches lives or dies on whether an editor believes the writer understands the boundary between coaching and care. The headline is where that belief starts, because an overreaching headline ends the read before the caveats in paragraph four ever arrive.
Your quote has one job
Translate the finding into something a human would say out loud.
The body of your release will be rewritten. The quote will be lifted whole. So spend your effort there and write it in speech, not in prose: contractions, short clauses, one idea. “People come to us about a diagnosis and stay about their kitchen” is a sentence a features editor will run. “Our methodology addresses executive function deficits holistically” will not survive contact with a copy desk, and neither will you.
Two sentences. First says what is happening, second says what it means for the reader. Nothing about your programme, your pricing, your openings, or your credentials. Credentials go in the boilerplate at the bottom, which is where every reporter looks for them anyway.
If you can add a second quote from a clinician, a school psychologist, or an assessment service, do it. That single addition changes the genre of the document from promotion to reporting, and it is the fastest credibility upgrade available to an ADHD coach who has no institution behind them.
Read it aloud before you paste it in. A quote that makes you wince when you say it will make a reader wince when they read it, and the wince is almost always coming from a word borrowed from clinical or corporate vocabulary. Swap those words for the ones you would use with a client sitting in front of you, and the sentence usually gets shorter and better at the same time.
What to do when the story is a person, not a program
Sometimes the news is a client, and this is where careful coaches get into trouble by being kind.
Consent is not a formality here. Written, specific, and revocable, naming exactly what may be published and where. A person who is fine appearing in a local paper in March may not be fine appearing in a national aggregator in September, and once it is out you cannot retrieve it. Give them a version to approve before it goes anywhere, and mean it when you say they can pull out.
Then think about what the story costs them. A disclosed ADHD diagnosis attached to a real name follows that person into every future job search. The client may not have modelled that. You have a duty to raise it even when it weakens your release, and an editor who senses you skipped that conversation will not work with you again.
The safer and often better version is a composite that you label as a composite, or an anonymised case with the details changed and the change disclosed. Reporters will accept that when you are upfront. They will not accept discovering it later.
There is a version of this that is safer for everyone and still makes a story: let the client speak about the system rather than the symptom. A person describing how they rebuilt their mornings is telling a useful, specific, publishable story without handing over their diagnosis as the headline. Reporters like it because it is concrete. Clients like it because it does not follow them around. You should like it because it demonstrates your actual work instead of the condition your work sits next to.
Handled well, a press release for ADHD coaches about a client is the strongest thing you can send, because it is the only version that shows the work rather than describing it. Handled badly it is the one that follows somebody for a decade.
Who actually opens this?
Four people, chosen deliberately, beat a distribution list of four hundred every time.
Find reporters who have written about ADHD, neurodiversity, education, or workplace accommodation in the last six months. Read the piece. Email each one separately, naming what you read and why your finding connects to it. Paste the release below your signature and attach nothing. Offer a fifteen-minute call and a named clinician they can also speak to.
Then wait a week, send one short follow-up, and move on. The release you send in ten weeks is the one that works, because by then your name in an inbox means something.
So the question to sit with before you open a blank document on Thursday: what have you actually counted in your practice that nobody outside it has ever seen?