About Dr. Jennie Byrne
Before I was a psychiatrist, I was trained to notice patterns other people couldn’t measure. My PhD work in neuroscience was built around the question, “What does attention actually look like, moment to moment, in a working brain?”
I spent years building tools to objectively assess and measure attention, rather than rely on subjective self-reporting. That instinct followed me into medicine, and it’s the reason my practice still leans on data in a way most psychiatry practices don’t bother with.
ADHD Found Me
Twenty years ago, running a new private practice near UNC, I started getting referrals the university wasn’t set up to handle: professors, physicians, lawyers, graduate students — people who had built entire careers on managing a brain they had never properly assessed. My residency training had spent all of 45 minutes on ADHD, and none of it on adults. So I did what my scientific training had taught me to do with an unsolved problem: I sought out the people who were true experts in the field, and I built the specialty I couldn’t find anywhere else. I am constantly seeking out new science and new information to ensure I’m providing the best solutions to my clients and helping the industry progress.
What continued sharpening my specialty in working with high achievers and professionals, though, wasn’t just the science — it was that I never watched this world from the outside. I’ve built and sold a practice as an entrepreneur, sat in the C-suite as a deputy chief medical officer and chief behavioral health officer, advised early-stage health companies, and spent years as the spouse of a high-achieving lawyer — which means I’ve lived inside the exact pressures I now treat: the board deadlines, the billable hours, the always-on inbox, the marriage where two demanding careers somehow have to share one household. That lived vantage point is also what pulled me into writing about moral injury and about how professionals actually work in this new, relentless version of the workplace — because ADHD in a high-achiever almost never shows up on its own. It shows up braided together with burnout, with a career that rewards masking, with a home life running on fumes. I don’t just diagnose the attention piece. I connect it to everything around it, because I’ve lived in that ecosystem myself.
Education & Training
I’m a board-certified psychiatrist with a PhD in neurophysiology, which means I look at ADHD the way a neuroscientist does: as a brain variant with a mechanism, not just a set of symptoms on a checklist.
- MD and PhD in Neurophysiology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine
- Psychiatry Residency, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
- BA, Biological Basis of Behavior and French, University of Pennsylvania
I’m the author of three books, including ADHD in Professionals: Embrace Your Brain, along with Work Smart and Moral Injury: Healing the Healers.
This Isn't Just Clinical For Me
I don’t have ADHD myself. What I do have is my own experience as an executive, a Chief Medical Officer, an entrepreneur, and a start-up advisor. I’ve sat in the seats my patients sit in: the ones where you’re expected to perform at the highest level while also running everything else underneath it. That’s part of why I know what this work actually requires.
It’s also personal in a more direct way. I have a neurodiverse child, so I don’t just treat this condition from a clinical distance. I’ve watched it up close, in someone I love, in a life outside my own.
Beyond The Practice
I am, above almost anything else, relentlessly curious — the kind of person who hears about a new skill and has to go try it (poorly!) for a while before deciding whether to stick with it. I trained as a classical violinist and bassoonist long before I trained as a psychiatrist, spent a year living in France struggling to become fluent, and currently play bass and sing in two different rock bands here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while working on a third instrument: saxophone. I live here with my husband, Tom, a recovering attorney turned writer, and our two kids, one of whom is in college.
There’s something intriguing about disciplines where you can’t fake competence — a bass line either locks in with the drummer or it doesn’t; a woven fiber piece either holds together or it unravels in your hands; a language either comes or it doesn’t, no matter how much you want it to. It’s not so different from what I ask my patients’ brains to do, or what I ask of my own attention when I’m deep in a diagnostic workup.
Practice, in the literal sense, is most of what actually works — and staying curious enough to keep starting over as a beginner is most of what makes practice possible.
None of that makes for a tidy CV line, but it’s most of what I’d want you to know about me before you sit down in my office: the arts matter enormously to me, and when I read, it’s unapologetically across genres — a good high-brow, low-brow mix, literary fiction one week and something trashier the next. I take long walks around town to think, and if my house were on fire, I’d walk out with a painting by my great-aunt Bobbie and our family photo albums — the things that are actually irreplaceable, as opposed to the things that just look impressive.
Dr. Byrne in The Press
