I spent the last year interviewing neurodivergent people of color about what happens when they walk into a therapist’s office. One line has stayed with me since.
A 26-year-old Latine woman with ADHD told me: “I was given a prescription for a diagnosis on a piece of paper, not for a Hispanic woman in her early 20s.” She wasn’t rejecting her medication. She was naming something more precise. She’d been treated as a diagnosis, limited to it, rather than as a person.
Six people shared their stories with me. What surprised me wasn’t that each described a barrier. It was that their barriers kept turning out to be the same barrier, showing up in different places.
The problems aren’t separate, and that’s the problem
When a clinician missed something cultural, it didn’t stay a cultural miss. It changed how that person’s neurodivergent traits got read, which changed what they felt safe saying, which changed whether they came back to the clinic at all. You can’t fix those problems one at a time, because nobody experiences them one at a time.
There’s a word for this: intersectionality. It means identities don’t stack up like layers; they interact, and the result is something specific to that combination. Not one of the participants I spoke with used the term. All of them described it.
After the Therapy Session
We describe therapy as a safe space, as though it’s sealed off from everything else. The people I spoke with described bringing their whole worlds in with them, whether they wanted to or not.
For one participant, a Chinese-American man with autism, the barrier here was language. Therapy vocabulary didn’t translate into Chinese in a way that worked at home. Words like boundaries and sensory overload sounded dramatic to his family. So therapy stayed in the room. He learned tools he could never use in the place he actually needed them. That’s not a therapist failing at their job. It’s what happens when we treat the therapy hour as the whole intervention, reducing its effectiveness on the way home.
Measured against a picture
Several participants spent years having their traits read as character flaws. Difficulty focusing became laziness. Emotional intensity became being dramatic. Disorganization became carelessness. One woman was tested five times before being diagnosed with ADHD. Her ADHD went overlooked because it didn’t look “disruptive,” like the “usual picture”. It looked, in her words, like “internal chaos”.
The cost isn’t only the wait, because by the time a medical explanation arrives, many people have already built an identity around the wrong one. “Maybe I’m just not trying hard enough,” as one participant said. Self-blame gets there first, and the diagnosis has to argue with years of accumulated evidence.
What actually worked
The most useful thing I heard wasn’t about what went wrong.
One woman described the first time a clinician saw all of her at once: “For the first time, someone was looking at the whole picture. I was able to be seen as all three.” ADHD, woman, Latine, all together instead of in sequence.
Her therapist wasn’t Latine. She was, in this participant’s words, “culturally educated.” She’d gotten curious.
That is the biggest lesson I learnt. If good care required identity matching, most people would be out of luck, because there aren’t enough clinicians to go around. What these stories suggest instead is that the thing doing the work is curiosity, and curiosity is learnable.
Which means this is fixable. Slowly, and not by any one person, but fixable.
Why I’m writing this
I’m a high school student, not a clinician. I can’t tell providers how to practice, but I can say what six people told me: they were rarely asked about the parts of their lives that mattered most, and when someone finally did, it changed things.
If you’re neurodivergent and a person of color and therapy has felt like a bad fit, I want you to know that experience is documented. It has patterns. It isn’t you being difficult or ungrateful or too much.
And if you’re looking for care, it’s worth asking a provider directly how they think about culture and neurodivergence together. Their answer tells you a lot.
Six stories aren’t the whole picture. But they’re six more than were in the research before, and every one of them said some version of the same thing:
Ask me about my whole life. Not just my symptoms.
Everyone deserves to be seen as a whole person. Explore Active Minds’ mental health resources, connect with a local chapter or community, and discover opportunities to advocate for more inclusive mental health care at ActiveMinds.org
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*All quotes and findings are drawn from original qualitative research conducted by Yashvi Bharariya, currently under review for publication*
