About Our Practice
Our Story
Behavioral Pediatrics of Rural Georgia began with a simple focus: children with ADHD, autism, and anxiety — the patients Dr. Michelle Zeanah loved and understood deeply. But her patients kept needing more. Picky eating so severe it threatened their health. Tic disorders with nowhere to turn. Families desperate to learn how to help their child at home, not just get a referral to a therapist hours away. So she figured out how to provide those services herself. We still work that way.
What started as one physician’s focused practice has grown into a full clinical team — physicians, physician assistants, a licensed professional counselor, nurses, and board certified behavior analysts — serving children from more than 80 Georgia counties.
Who We Serve
We are a rural practice. Not just located in a rural community — we understand rural families in ways that urban specialty practices cannot. Rural parents have fewer support services nearby. They often figure things out themselves. They are more likely to ask “Can you teach me how to help my child?” than “Can you refer me to someone closer to home?” We built our care model around that reality. Parent coaching is not an add-on here — it is central to everything we do.
We also provide medical case management — coordinating care across the multiple providers, schools, and agencies often involved in the lives of children with complex needs. Few pediatric practices offer this. For families navigating systems that rarely communicate with each other, this makes an enormous difference.
Our Calling
From the beginning, we have felt called to serve the children who need us most and have the least access to care like ours. That calling has always included children in foster care and children being raised by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and others who stepped up when a child needed them.
These children often carry labels that don’t fit and histories that make accurate evaluation difficult. Getting the diagnosis right matters enormously for their future.
We are called to this work. That conviction led us to formalize what we were already doing — we now have an active collaboration with the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services to identify autism in children in the foster care system, bringing the same careful evaluation we give every patient to the children least likely to receive it otherwise.
Ready to take the next step? Call us at 912-489-4379.