Image by Rashid Talukder

Hi! We’re 3 Bangladeshi women in Toronto, ON.

Each of us were late-diagnosed, in adulthood, with

ADHD and/or Autism.

Three Bangladeshi women smiling and posing for a photo. 
Maria, Maddie and Shupa At B/deshi summer networking event, 2023.

There’s a lot about how South Asian people deal with mental health that we wanna help to destigmatize, but we first have to acknowledge how much shame we had to dig ourselves up out of to even embark on this quest. It was hard, and it was lonely.

First, we had to find (and even create) safety to understand the ways in which we struggled, and then? We had to tell our family and friends - people who often had no language to express their own neurodivergent experiences, other than words like “tension” and “stress”.

Historically, women and people of colour have routinely been excluded from medical & psychological research, which has led to a lack of understanding of neurodivergent traits in marginalized folks. Having critical conversations about our culture’s perceptions of neurodivergence was crucial to us finding each other, and we know we’re not the only ones. To uplift those who need care most, we have to find them - and to do this, we know we have to embody the strength it takes to be loud and proud about our stories, to un-shame ourselves so that future generations don’t have to carry that stigma forward. Effectively unshaming ourselves from unknowingly living in a world that wasn’t built for us means providing the space and language necessary to understand ourselves and our families, while working to encourage awareness and resourcing.

We’re committed to the well-being of people who don’t fit the ADHD/autism archetype; those who have had to be resilient and persist to the point of burnout - those who, under constant threat of extinction in oppressive structures and systems, survive nonetheless. We believe that distributing free & accessible mental health knowledge will put people like us on the path towards self-discovery and self-empowerment, and allow them to live more authentically in their own skin, radically awake in their own lives.

Maria Khandaker

Co-founder | CEO | Chief Technical Officer

This knowledge, and the heightened state of emotion I felt while gathering data and thus holding other people’s pain, burned me out completely. I never handed that paper in, opting to avoid my professor’s emails and ultimately fail the class. It was really cute and ADHD of me!

I switched careers out of shame and a lack of persistence (also very ADHD of me), choosing to try my analytical brain’s hand (?) at software engineering. Highly analytical, brilliant people of colour shared desk space with me, and suffered with very similar symptoms, but we all hid how bad it was from one another, choosing instead to just say we were “still working on that pesky bug fix”, for days at a time. When I did a presentation about ADHD at work, though, coworkers reached out to me for resources that they hadn’t been able to find through their own family doctors. This situation was absurd, but I couldn’t look away. I dove into the research, and tried to figure out why and how so many of us fell through the cracks of psychometric diagnostics. Looking at the compounding effects of neurodiversity & intergenerational trauma ultimately lead me to the realization that I was autistic, and had a healthy dash of c-PTSD sprinkled on top. My autism burnout journey has been overall less tough on me than my ADHD one, thanks in large part to Au-DHD women content creators - but I never saw any brown women in these spaces. Mental healthcare often feels like a luxury and not a basic need for brown women, especially for those of us who have learned to be selfless and ashamed to share with people outside of our families. As if we don’t deserve to know ourselves or live for ourselves in equal measure.

I decided to develop neurokin - the community I needed when I was an undiagnosed autistic kid. I really hope it helps you return home to yourself.

— Maria

Those who knew me when I was a child say I was talkative, nerdy, bright, curious, and fascinated by culture and how it shapes the human mind. I'm still that kid - a jack of all trades and a compulsive dabbler, my truest passion has always been understanding people. A creature of logic, I pursued a degree in Mental Health Studies, at University of Toronto Scarborough. Here, through copious research and a lot of tears, I realized I had ADHD while writing an essay on gifted burnouts (which, I discovered, were just undiagnosed people of colour).

Shupa Rahman

Co-founder | Chief of Operations | Chief of Data

Hi! I am Shupa, your emotional support cousin.

I have over 6 years of interdisciplinary research experience, and a strong publication record in peer-reviewed scientific journals. My educational background in sustainability management with a focus in food security made me initially curious about health equity in marginalized communities. Since then, I’ve become a passionate advocate for efforts to reduce health inequity in BIPOC communities through decolonizing health research and destigmatizing conversations around mental health within these communities, especially for women.

This topic is a personal one for me. While struggling to complete my Masters, I remember going to various mental health facilities across Ontario and explaining to each person that I was feeling “stuck”, only to be prescribed anti-depressants. I kept maintaining that I was not depressed, only distressed because of my situation, but I did not have the language to articulate the complexities of what I was experiencing. As an international student in her mid-20s, pursuing a higher education in a foreign country with little support, I had no understanding that I might be neurodivergent - it turns out I was - and I had never seen any research that could support the later finding that I have autism. I forgive myself for not knowing this, but I’m disappointed that my clinicians were as clueless as me.

I am using my research, mentorship skills and experience to make life more livable for fellow women of colour who are trying to figure out how to thrive in a world that has not been built for them. I want to create a community and, ultimately, a world where neurodiverse women of colour can find:

  • the language to talk about their struggles

  • a safe space to understand the diverse cultural nuances that shape their experience

  • the strength and agency to advocate for themselves.

Through my work, I hope to remove the stigma and shame associated with autism and the topic of mental health in our communities.

Thanks for sticking with us!

— Shupa

Maddie Bakshi

Chief Product Officer

[BIO COMING SOON - she’s too busy doing product, let her live]