Dr. Karen Lee Pierce, MD

After seeing another reviewer's post about their childhood experience with Dr. Pierce, I feel compelled to echo their statement that generally I walked away feeling like my parents' perspectives were the only thing taken into account. My sibling has similar sentiments. I am in my 30s now and the trauma I experienced by not feeling heard by her, or my parents, still lingers deeply despite years of therapy with more personally supportive professionals. I saw her from about 6 or 7 years of age and well into my teen years. Some of my few vivid memories from childhood are of conversations where I was entirely dismissed because I was a child and told I was just "stuck in cement". I was put on what I now know to be extremely intensive medicines, many times over, for behavior that now, as a teacher, I know to be cries for help based on my family structure and I would have been better supported by behavioral interventions and family therapy that focused on my parents' role in the dysfunction.… Sadly, instead, all fingers pointed at me as a problem to fix, and Dr. Pierce played a leading role in that as my parents' behaviors and difficulties with parenting were never called into question. I was the problem to fix, plain and simple. This contributed to continuing immense family dysfunction that, I feel, could have been greatly improved had her approach been more to guide the parents in their own struggles with parenting, form connections with the child entirely separate from the parents involvement in sessions with me, and less of an inclination to medicate. In her defense, the prevailing thought at the time was that medicine was an absolutely vital component in fixing the mental health of children. Now, I sincerely hope she has changed her approach and recognized that most children's behavioral outbursts and emotional difficulties are a signal of a bigger problem within the structure of the parents and family, not that the child is chemically imbalanced.

I saw Dr Pierce from the time I was 7 until I was 15. I never felt very comfortable with her style of treatment which involved irrelevant questions that were deeply personal. She had an agenda and was very clearly there to serve the parents of the children she was working with as opposed to the patients she was supposed to be primarily serving. She has a tendency to hold on to clients for years as opposed to getting fresh viewpoints every few years. 20 something years with a client is excessive.. I also strongly suspect many of these 5 star reviews are from parents of teens not the patients themselves.

She has been extraordinarily helpful to our 9 year-old daughter with ADHD