Much of the mainstream conversation around neurodivergence has been shaped through a WEIRD* lens.
We’ve overlooked how culture, migration, family expectations, and systemic inequities shape the lived experience of neurodivergent people and their families.
Ideas about behaviour, disability, parenting, and help seeking can differ significantly in collectivist, Eastern cultures from dominant Western frameworks.
It is important that support takes into account this layer of cultural understanding to make the paradigm more accessible and inclusive to us all, without the need to water down parts of self.
Culturally informed neuroaffirming practice creates space for multiple truths.
It invites curiosity and supports families to find approaches that hold all of their identities together, as whole, complex human beings.
Sandhya is an AuDHD psychologist, an immigrant and a parent of two children, one of whom is also AuDHD. Raising children in a mixed heritage household away from her home country, she navigates the complexity of leaning into identity in places that try to keep it hidden.
Sandhya has both provided and received training in cultural safety, and understands the many ways neurodivergence is understood and discussed across cultures.
She 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.
