Ep23. AuDHD & Immigrant Realities with Sandhya Menon

Bri sits down with Sandhya Menon, AuDHD developmental psychologist, author of The Brain Forest, The Rainbow Brain, and My Body's Power Pack, and one of Australia's most trusted voices in neurodivergent affirming practice. Together, they explore a topic that doesn't get nearly enough airtime: what it actually means to be AuDHD and an immigrant, and why the dominant narrative in neurodivergent spaces still has a long way to go.

Sandhya shares her own story of moving from Singapore to Melbourne in 2007, arriving in winter without a coat, navigating racism, Australian slang, and a culture where "how you going?" felt like a rude question. She speaks candidly about what it took to settle her nervous system, how cultural context gets lost in clinical translation, and why her own ADHD diagnosis took three years because her presentation was misread as trauma.

This conversation is warm, honest, and genuinely challenging in the best way.

Key Takeaways

• Cultural lens matters in assessment. Existing diagnostic frameworks carry assumptions that aren't universally applicable: that people are naturally help-seeking, that English fluency equals English thinking, that emotional expression looks the same across cultures. It often doesn't.
• Compensation isn't masking. For many people from collectivist cultures, what looks like masking is actually deeply ingrained cultural expectation around family roles, hierarchy, and "saving face." These are not the same thing, and conflating them causes diagnostic blind spots.
• Language doesn't just translate. Sandhya shares the example of garang, a word that captures fierceness rooted in love and discipline, something "anger" simply can't hold. When we lose the untranslatable, we lose context that matters clinically.
• Notice before you fix. When discomfort arises, the instinct is to move to action. Sandhya invites us to pause, sit with it, and ask what the discomfort is trying to teach us before reaching for a solution or a statement.
• Do the work. The resources already exist. Scroll back through the archives. Borrow diverse books from the library. Use the tools you already have. Asking marginalised people to educate you is labour. Doing the work first is respect.
• Sharing power is a practice. Whether that's stepping aside from a speaking opportunity, buying extra conference tickets for people who can't afford it, or asking whose voice is actually needed in the room, equity is built in the everyday decisions.

Find Sandhya: @onwardsandupwardspsych on InstagramBooks: The Brain Forest, The Rainbow Brain, My Body's Power Pack can be found at her website, www.onwardsandupwardspsychology.com.au.