PhD student Nahime Guadalupe Aguirre Mtanous, was recently featured as a guest on the LWC Studios podcast, “100 Latina Birthdays,” to discuss neurodivergence in the Latine community. Nahime shared her expertise based on extensive practice experience working with adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and providing mental health therapy to neurodivergent adults as well as perspectives from her current research into understanding and improving health outcomes for autistic people as they age.
Nahime and the hosts discussed the impacts of social media, especially TikTok, on people’s understanding of neurodivergence. As she described, “A recent content analysis of #autism content on TikTok (Gilmore et al., 2024) indicates that only about 7.2% of information is meant to be educational and factual. This means that it is very easy for people to misattribute their own experiences as symptoms of autism.” While Nahime says that it is great that people are discussing neurodivergence more, much of the conversation online is deficits-focused and leads to a poor understanding of it. She says that people with possible symptoms of neurodivergence should seek a formal diagnosis, although she highlights that this can be very difficult since formal diagnosis is expensive and many medical professionals do not have the experience to properly diagnose autism and other forms of neurodivergence. Further, she says that clinicians and the current diagnostic system do not always know enough about different cultural and social environments, such as Latine culture, to make accurate diagnoses.
Nahime hopes that more evidence-based training, practice, and research, including her own, will improve the future for those with autism and other forms of neurodivergence. As she said, “Roughly five million people in the United States are autistic. We are an incredibly large group whose mental health needs have long gone unaddressed.” She also aims to help other students and mental health practitioners continue to improve the ways in which they support neurodiverse individuals. As she described, “You don’t have to specialize in neurodiversity to be a neurodiversity-affirming therapist; you just have to care.”
Listen to the podcast episode here podcast episode.