Featured in the Summer 2026 GAMHPA Newsletter

I’m excited to share that a piece of mine has been published in the Summer 2026 Glendale Area Mental Health Professionals Association (GAMHPA) Newsletter.

My article, “I Am the Gap I’ve Been Trying to Close: On ADHD, Autism, Gifted/2e, AFAB, and BIPOC Communities, and Why the System Keeps Missing Us,” appears on pages 13 to 15.

I first wrote about this topic several months ago, and it remains one of the more personal intersections of my lived experience and professional work.

Where this piece began

I spent years helping people understand their brains before I fully understood my own.

I was identified as AuDHD well into adulthood, after I had already earned my doctorate, published research, given dozens of presentations and workshops, and developed my career as a psychologist.

Those accomplishments did not mean I was not struggling. In many ways, they made the effort, strain, and support needs beneath the surface easier to overlook.

The reality is that a great deal can remain hidden behind high performance, especially for gifted and twice-exceptional people, AFAB individuals, and BIPOC communities.

Giftedness can compensate for areas of difficulty, masking can make strain harder to see, and someone can appear highly capable while using an enormous amount of energy simply to maintain that level of functioning.

My own experience brought a more personal dimension to patterns I had already been seeing in my clinical work.

From insight to building differently

Those patterns have also directly informed the work I’m building through Faces of Health.

The goal is not simply to provide more mental health information. It is to create clinically grounded, culturally responsive tools that are practical to use in everyday life.

That means taking into account the realities of neurodivergence, chronic illness, stress, and the many factors that influence whether someone can actually use the support they are given. Faces of Health was built with those realities in mind.