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is autism and ADD (attention deficit disorder) the same in a assesment?

NAS50325

I know they're separate conditions but through doing my own researching since realising I may have autism I also suspect ADD but the conditions are very alike so say if I was to go to an assessment (which seems impossible atm) would I be diagnosed with both as I cannot wait and go through the stress of getting both diagnosed, so in a nutshell would it be a 2 in 1 assessment thanks 

  • no if your going for a autism assessment all they can assess is autism as far as im aware.... its beaurocratic, to get any other assessments you have to do it seperately and satisfy their beaurocratic paperwork system.

    also if you mention it they may put your autism assessment on hold as then they maybe thinking that the autistic traits your trying to get assessed could infact not be autistic traits but add traits instead with this new information, and so this will cause complications as often they have to seperate each individual trait and if a trait is used for autism it cannot be used for add or something, there has to be seperate standalone traits for each one.

    but by your logic anyway, all disorders share the exact same traits.... you should look through more, research shizotypal, schizoid, bpd and any other you can think of... you will find they all share the same taits... so how do they seperate and diagnose correct? .... thats the thing, they dont, they dont know what they are doing, its all guess work and if a trait has been allocated to autism they wont use it for another and if they do they will undo the autism diagnosis pending review if they are to remove a trait they thought was autism from you and allocate it to another disorder...  so yeah you run the chance of complicating it and it being pending investigation and then a choice of whether to slot matching traits into one thing or the other based on their best educated guess by everything they know about you.

  • I think it may depends on where you go for the assessment and the assessor, but not completely sure.

    Btw, this might be of interest to you: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/Whitwell%20Susannah%20-%20ASD%20CPD%20Updates.pdf

    There also seem to be clinics that offer both, but it seems that you may need two assessments in the same clinic:

    https://www.thetukecentre.org.uk/services/autism/

    https://cambridgeadhdclinic.com

    https://effraclinic.co.uk/about

  • Both within the NHS and privately at the Tuke Centre, York we have been told that the assessments are completely separate.  This in spite of there being some overlap between these diagnoses.  

    The Tuke Centre also advised us against having both assessment processes concurrently because they felt it would be too much to go through psychologically.  What this meant was that our son chose to have the ADHD assessment first (still awaiting results) and he'll be going for the autism assessment in the new year.

    That said, I think that if we were sticking with NHS services, we'd probably get referred for both because there are generally long waits and the chances of them both coming in at the same time might be low.  My own wait for an autism assessment ended up being over a year and a half, from initial referral to final diagnosis.