A mean-field description of the excited states of the molecular system strongly interacting with photonic degrees of freedom, and a correction to the ground-state that contains coupling between the CQED-RHF reference and simultaneous electronic and photonic excitations, may be obtained through a configuration interaction singles (CIS) ansatz. Here we formulate a non-Hermitian version of such an ansatz, NH-CQED-CIS, that incorporates the dissipative features of the photonic degrees of freedom. In our presentation, we formulate NH-CQED-CIS in the coherent state basis using the orbitals that result from the CQED-RHF approach outlined in the appendix.