Sarah Valerio

As a first year social work graduate student, I had the honor dto be accepted as an intern at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in the New Jersey Transition to Coordinated Care Program (NJ TACC). The purpose of the program is to help Autistic & Neurodivergent youth and young adults who are aging out of pediatric medical, mental health, and community support services; to be directly connected with appropriate adult medical and mental health providers, and to receive support in navigating the benefits and services services available to adults who meet criteria state defined criteria.On the very first day of my internship, I was thrown without warnign into a working group phone call with over 200 participants including Medical Doctors, Mental Health Providers, Community Partners and other Stakeholders. What I learned that day was that everyone on the call agreed that there was a DIRE lack of both medical and mental health providers willing to work with adults who have Intellectual and Developmental disability diagnoses. Additionally, I learned that almost every form of mental health "evidence based practice" had never been independently studied in Autistic adults or adults with other forms of neurodivergence (officially diagnosed or via self identification). That was the day I decided I would be a mental health clinician seeking extra training and experience to work with Neurodivergent populations. The passion and commitment I felt about my career path was further driven  as I learned I had to be a strong advocate with medical, mental health, and educational professionals, to ensure my children were appropriately assessed, diagnosed and received affirming care that focused on strengths and support needs verses pathologiziing them. At some point I realized, the similarities between my challenges in childhood and adulthood and the challenges my children were experiencing. I was formally diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, over the age of 40. I often self identify as Audhd, because that combined Neurotype, makes the most sense in terms of how my brain works and how I experience the world. At the time of my diagnosis, it was almost impossible to find mental health professionals trained to support adult clients working through the complex process of unmasking, leverage strengths based, compassion focused approaches to treatment, and willing to affirm my choice to accept self identification as valid. Forget about finding a clinician who even  attempted to conceptualize how the impact of masking for decades might have impaceted my mental health! I knew I deserved better care than I was receiving. You, and so many other Autistic and/or Neurodivergent Folks deserve better mental health care too! My dream is that every autistic and neurodivergent adult will have access to affordable, high quality, evidence based, compassionate, Neurodiversity Affirming Mental Health Care; ideally from at therapist who is also neurodivergent.

My clients are the experts about their own lives. My approach with all clients is to focus on taking time to get to know them, learn about their strengths, parts of their lives they find challenging; then help them to develop new strengths based, affirming, and self compassion focused lenses & strategies to support their personal growth and enable them to meet their goals. Every human being deserves a safe space to feel seen, heard and validated. My goal is to create an affirming space where every client can feel safe to show up as their authentic self, without ever feeling judged.