As you can see from my little thread under I've got my appointment, I had my diagnostic appointment at Surrey and Borders Partnership yesterday.
Mine was a cancellation appointment, so the usual process of filling in questionnaires weeks before the date was compressed into 30 minutes in the waiting room. This was OK if a little rushed but the staff were keen to point out that anything I didn't get through could be done after the appointment, so the only pressure was that which I was putting on myself.
My wife came into the interview with me, and was able to help me answer some questions by reminding me of anecdotes and telling stories from her perspective.
Almost the first thing the lady interviewing said was that I wouldn't get a diagnosis that day. This was unexpected compared to what I had heard from others, but now I'm thinking that this might be because they didn't have chance to read my answers to the questionnaires and form some judgements, focus questions etc. before the meeting.
So the interviewer is going to collate my written answers and her notes from the interview (she took loads on a laptop), write a report, and present it at an upcoming monthly meeting with the "multifunctional team". I should have an answer in 6 weeks or so. At least this is a fairly certain and short wait compared to the open-ended 14 months I've waited so far!
The answer that I will hear will be, apparently, one of: 1) positive diagnosis, 2) a note of “difficulties”, 3) need for further tests, 4) signpost to something else, or 5) “you’re perfectly normal”.
To make a positive diagnosis there has to be a "functional impact" on my life. I'm not sure I will reach the bar for this, which partly feels a little unfair because I feel that I'm the one doing all of the work to overcome my traits to *stop* them having a functional impact. Maybe the fact that this is even *possible*, correctly excludes me from a diagnosis. Who knows :-).
I learned something new too though, explaining some of the confusion around "everyone is a bit autistic". If you dig deep enough (and the lady interviewing me did exactly this), you can differentiate between effects caused by autism and the *same effect* caused by something else. This aligns with that classic analogy used to explain the falsehood of "everyone's a little autistic" which goes along the lines of "Person A suffers from morning sickness; she's pregnant. Person B says 'hey I get morning sickness too - does that mean I'm pregnant?'. Person A says 'No, that's because you drink too much every night and by the way you're male!". So the examples around "autistic" symptoms that came up yesterday were 1) following rules because you fear the consequences of being caught vs being unable to conceive that breaking rules is possible, and 2) sticking to a daily routine because it's a useful way of delegating choices to the subconscious and lightening the load on the conscious mind, vs being rigidly stuck to a daily routine and highly distressed if this is threatened.
I don't know if I'm explaining the differential diagnosis stuff above accurately - I'm not the expert! But that's the kind of learning I took away.
In all I spent three hours or so talking about my life, with quite a bit of digging into my memory of childhood (ASD as we know is a lifetime condition and it's important to be able to pick out the thread, even if the impacts / symptoms vary over time). I didn't come away with too many "I wish I had mentioned X or said Y a little differently"; there were *some*, but I'm sure she got enough to form an accurate picture on the whole. I left a bunch of writing that I had done over the last year or so, summarising and explaining the impact on me and the basis on which I self-diagnosed, which she was grateful for and seemed to intend to go through "with a fine toothed comb".
Hope that helps give some insight into the process and *why* they ask what they ask & form the opinions that they do.
