Dozens of clinicians and their patients are scrambling after the abrupt closure last week of The Chesapeake Center, a nationally known Bethesda-based practice specializing in ADHD with multiple locations in the region and one in Florida.

The closure, after 35 years in business, followed a feud between family members who managed the center. In the span of two weeks in December, Langdon Comee, the daughter of ADHD researcher and Chesapeake Center founder Kathleen Nadeau, stepped down as CEO, returned to the job, and was then fired by her mother, according to internal emails reviewed by The Banner.

Comee, reached by phone on Friday, said business declined sharply in the past year, due in part to mass federal government layoffs, which led to a drop in demand for services, which, she noted, are “high priced.”

She also said she is no longer talking to her mother and that their disagreements over how to handle the center’s deteriorating finances came to a head around Thanksgiving.

“It was a viable company,” Comee said. “I lament very much the outcome that it has been closed.”

She added that she “can’t continue to speculate” on what she described as her mother’s decision to close the business.

Nadeau declined to comment after numerous attempts to reach her. The Banner called, messaged her work email address and visited her Bethesda residence on Friday.

The closure also follows a Dec. 12 incident in which a staff member emailed dozens of patients about accessing their prescriptions over the holidays but failed to shield the patients’ email addresses from each other, the emails show. A second email apologized for the lapse.

This account of the chaotic last days of The Chesapeake Center relies on dozens of internal emails reviewed by the Banner that Nadeau, Comee, Chesapeake Center directors and clinicians sent to each other between the middle of December and early January.

The emails revealed how rifts within the family played out in front of staff — who included psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers — and how the closure blindsided them and their patients.

Many patients and parents of patients expressed fears in chats on Reddit and the DC Urban Moms and Dads forum that they could no longer fill prescriptions, access test results or continue to receive care. And clinicians have privately — anonymously online and in conversations with The Banner — shared fears about damage to their professional reputations and losing patients to other clinics.

While some patients posted on the forums that they’d heard about the closing from their clinician, others wrote that they’d only learned about it from online discussions.

In several of the emails last week, Nadeau, a 79-year-old clinical psychologist who has written more than a dozen books about ADHD, told her team that the business was in debt. She also said she planned to draw down her savings and retirement accounts to pay clinicians for their work.

The Chesapeake Center’s website states that the business closed “at the end of 2025″ — which, according to the internal emails, would have been before Nadeau told her staff.

In a letter to patients posted on the website, Nadeau writes that “it was simply not feasible for the clinic to continue for reasons beyond our control.”

Nadeau’s son-in-law, Gonzalo Villamizar, who was an advisor to the business — and for three months in early 2025, its interim chief operating officer — responded to an inquiry from The Banner Friday and indicated that his view of the business’s closure aligns with his wife’s.

Emails and phone calls to at least seven staffers who were working at the center when it closed went unanswered. The few others who responded declined to comment on the record for this story.

Family feud

In a farewell note to staff members on Jan. 2, the day the center closed, Villamizar wrote that his wife had worked there for more than a decade and that Nadeau had anticipated entrusting her daughter with what was once “a small practice in Silver Spring.”

Founded in 1983, the center grew to include a headquarters in Bethesda and locations in Silver Spring, Fulton, Washington, D.C., and Florida. Clinicians provided services in psychotherapy, medication management, cognitive-behavioral therapy, tutoring and study skills, and parent coaching.

Villamizar also wrote fondly of years in which he, his wife and mother-in-law worked well together.

Comee wrote in an internal email on Dec. 15 that, after 15 years at the center, she was immediately stepping down as CEO.

Following her daughter’s departure, Nadeau discussed with her attorney, Roger Samek, the possibility of creating a board of directors to provide “guidance and financial oversight” for her clinic, according to an internal email.

Samek could not be reached for comment by phone or email on Friday.

Then, three days after she had stepped down as CEO, Comee returned to the role, according to an internal announcement, which also stated that Nadeau was reconsidering a plan to retire from the clinic.

Former clinical director David Palmiter, who wrote to the staff about Comee’s departure and return, explained that there had been “a family thing,” but gave assurances that Nadeau and Comee were ready to move forward.

Ten days later, according to two internal emails, Nadeau fired her daughter.

Palmiter declined to comment for this story.

Scrambling for answers

In an email sent to staff the night of Jan. 1, Nadeau wrote that The Chesapeake Center would close, calling the decision “heartbreaking, but unavoidable.”

“Despite my intense efforts to counteract the many forces that have contributed to its demise, we have reached the end of the road,” she wrote.

Nadeau wrote that her team was preparing an accounting of the center’s finances and acknowledged that it still owed some staff members money for their work.

She wrote that clinicians would have to contact their patients to notify them of the closure and reschedule appointments, ensure their patients continued to receive care and arrange to have clinical records transferred by Jan. 15.

In the days that followed, the center’s clinicians repeatedly emailed the three family members seeking answers about transferring records, ensuring compliance with federal privacy laws and getting paid for December’s work.

By Jan. 3, at almost noon, patients were still receiving automated calls and emails about future appointments, according to emails.

In an email responding to staff concerns, Villamizar wrote that he and Comee “learned of this closure without warning and have been locked out. Wish we could help. And at this point, everything is entirely in Kathleen’s hands.”

The emails also show that clinicians, most of whom are independent contractors, challenged Nadeau’s assertion that it was their responsibility to maintain past client records.

“Requesting that independent contractors assume records custody places clinicians in an ethically and legally vulnerable position and may violate HIPAA and state record-retention laws,” one clinician wrote.

Struggling to help

As clinicians sought answers about the center’s closure, Nadeau tried to assure them that she had a plan to help them transition.

She apologized in a Jan. 4 email for a lack of communication, writing that she had been “overwhelmed and … doing my best.”

She wrote that all clinicians and staff members would be paid for work they did before Jan. 2, even if it required her to pay out of her own pocket.

She also wrote that her team was working with its cloud-based records system, DrChrono, so clinicians could access their patients’ medical records through at least the end of January.

In another email later that day, Nadeau affirmed that all clinicians and staff members would be paid for their work, but that it would require her to draw down her savings and retirement accounts.

“Since there are debts, it is not as simple as transferring the money to a Chesapeake account in order to pay you, because the money might get stuck there,” she wrote.

And she wrote that she would continue paying the records system provider until the clinicians had all exported their patients’ records.

Nadeau wrote that the center would find a third-party records custodian for medical records, saying she had previously and erroneously been advised that individual contractors should be the custodians of records for their patients.

She acknowledged in a separate email at the time that she was “struggling to gain control over very complex systems that I have never managed before.”