Addressing the cultural gap in neurodivergent therapy for people of colour

A personal essay highlights how intersecting identities of race and neurodivergence shape therapeutic experiences for people of colour, calling for more culturally responsive care and curiosity from clinicians.

For many neurodivergent people of colour, the hardest part of therapy is not entering the room but being understood once they are in it. In a first-person essay for Active Minds, Yashvi Bharariya described interviewing six people over the past year and finding the same pattern repeated in different forms: care that reduced them to a diagnosis, missed the cultural context around their lives or failed to connect what happened in the session with what happened at home. Research on intersectionality in therapy has long warned against treating identity as a single issue, and Bharariya’s reporting shows how race, language and neurodivergence can shape one another in practice.

One participant, a Latine woman with ADHD, said she felt as if she had been given “a prescription for a diagnosis on a piece of paper, not for a Hispanic woman in her early 20s”. Another, a Chinese-American man with autism, found that the words used in therapy did not translate cleanly into family life, leaving coping tools stranded in the consulting room. That gap between clinical language and daily reality echoes guidance on cultural competence in therapy, which says effective care depends not only on awareness but also on the ability to adapt to a client’s background and setting.

Bharariya’s account also points to the cost of being seen through the wrong lens for years. Behaviours that were later understood as signs of ADHD had been interpreted as laziness, carelessness or dramatic behaviour, and one woman was tested five times before receiving a diagnosis. That delay matters because self-blame often takes hold first, building an identity around failure long before an explanation arrives. Research on neurodiversity-affirming care and on intersectionality in therapy for Black autistic people similarly argues that support has to account for overlapping identities, not just symptoms in isolation.

The essay’s strongest point is that the answer is not perfect identity matching between client and therapist, which is often unrealistic. Instead, Bharariya argues for curiosity: a clinician willing to ask, listen and learn how culture and neurodivergence operate together. That approach aligns with advice for clients seeking BIPOC therapists, which suggests asking direct questions about a provider’s understanding of race, culture and identity. In practice, the issue is less about finding someone identical and more about finding someone prepared to see the whole person.

Bharariya, who says she is a high school student rather than a clinician, frames the piece as a call for care that starts with the full human being, not the chart. Her conclusion is simple: if therapists ask only about symptoms, they miss the context that gives those symptoms meaning. For neurodivergent people of colour, that can be the difference between treatment that merely categorises and treatment that actually helps.