Much of the mainstream conversation around neurodivergence has been shaped through a narrow cultural lens. While this work has been important, it often overlooks how culture, migration, family expectations, and systemic inequities shape the lived experience of neurodivergent people and their families.
For many culturally and linguistically marginalised families, particularly those from collectivist cultures, ideas about behaviour, disability, parenting, and help seeking can differ significantly from dominant Western frameworks. Without cultural understanding, neuroaffirming approaches can often feel inaccessible, unsafe, or misaligned, even when well intentioned.
Culturally informed neuroaffirming practice creates space for multiple truths. It recognises that neurodivergence does not exist in isolation, but within families, communities, histories, and systems. It invites curiosity rather than judgement, and supports families to find approaches that honour both neurodivergent identities and cultural values.
Sandhya is an AuDHD psychologist and a parent of two children, one of whom is also AuDHD. She is raising her family in Melbourne within a mixed heritage household alongside her partner, bringing lived experience of neurodivergence, culture, and identity into both her personal life and professional work.
With a deep understanding of intersectional identities, Sandhya uses her lived experience as a lens for navigating the complexities of behaviour, emotional expression, and support. She is deeply aware of the many ways neurodivergence can be misunderstood or silenced across different cultures, and remains committed to ongoing learning about how this shows up in cultures beyond her own, where conversations about disability, regulation, and difference are often layered with expectation, pressure, or shame.
When you’re neurodivergent and Asian, it can be tricky to step feet in both worlds, where mainstream neurodivergent spaces may not reflect your cultural experience, and your Asian community may not yet have the language for who you are and understanding yourself. Cultural context shapes how we understand ourselves, how we were diagnosed (or weren’t), how we move through the world and in our homes.
So we’re here bridging that gap. Asian and AuDHD is a community founded by Sandhya in 2024, built for Autistic and ADHDer Asians living in Australia and welcome those from the Asian diaspora parenting Autistic and/or ADHDers as well. Over the years, our community has grown to 290 members, and continues to grow.
We offer a space for community building, to ask questions, meet up in Zoom and in person, information and resources and referrals to find culturally responsive healthcare practitioners. We are a home for anyone from across the Asian continent — Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, Singaporean, Indonesian, and everywhere in between — who wants to explore what neurodivergence looks and feels like through a cultural lens.
We’re still growing, still shaping what this community looks like ….. and that’s exactly the point. This is yours to help build.
