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Kenneth Downing
About
Hello and welcome. I’m Dr. Kenneth Downing, a licensed psychologist with over three decades of experience conducting psychological evaluations and working with neurodivergent adolescents and adults. I am licensed in multiple states and have spent much of my career integrating assessment, psychotherapy, and deep developmental understanding to help individuals make sense of their experiences in a way that is accurate, respectful, and empowering. Many people seek autism assessment not because something is “wrong,” but because they have long felt different, misunderstood, or chronically out of sync with their environments. They are often intelligent, capable, and hardworking, yet exhausted from trying to interpret social expectations or manage sensory and emotional overwhelm. My role is to provide you clarity. I approach assessment as a collaborative process that honors your lived experience while carefully integrating developmental history, current functioning, and objective data. At Prosper Health, I conduct comprehensive telehealth interviews that seek to understand not just symptoms but patterns, how you think, process, relate, cope, and adapt. My goal is that by the end of the process, you feel seen in a way that is thoughtful, precise, and validating.
Over three decades I have worked with many individuals who were bright, capable, and conscientious, yet carried a quiet sense that something about their internal experience did not match what others expected of them. Some were misdiagnosed or misunderstood. Some were told they were “too sensitive,” “too intense,” “too rigid,” or “too much.” I am drawn to autism assessment because of the profound shift that can occur when a person’s lifelong patterns are finally organized into a coherent and respectful framework. When the narrative changes from “What is wrong with me?” to “This is how my mind works,” it can challenge self-doubt while increasing understanding and compassion for what makes you uniquely “you.” That clarity carries the potential to help you change your trajectory personally, in relationships, and professionally.
The strengths-based approach I use does not ignore difficulties, it puts them into context. Many autistic individuals have developed sophisticated adaptive strategies to navigate environments not designed for them. I look carefully at those adaptations, at cognitive style, problem-solving ability, reasoning, and areas of intensity or focus that typically represent genuine strengths. My approach is thoughtful and developmentally informed. I pay attention to nuance, the difference between social disinterest and social exhaustion, between rigidity and a need for predictability, between emotional intensity and sensory overload. I work to ensure that conclusions are not reductive, but instead reflect the complexity of the person sitting in front of me. Clients often describe my style as calm, perceptive, and direct. I work to create an environment where you can speak honestly about your experience without needing to mask, perform, or minimize.
