Hi all.
I promised to write this a while ago to try and help anyone who might be stuck in the middle of the process of an ASD assessment, and a few people were keen to understand the process. I found there were long periods of silence between contacts and appointments, and it is easy to find yourself feeling forgotten or lost in the system.
I was originally planning to do this sooner, but I thought I best to see the process out to a point so that I could paint the whole picture rather than pieces as it might make things more confusing.
I am 37 years old, so this would be considered quite a late diagnosis – however I am aware there are a lot of people in my situation, and I found out there are large differences in the timeline in different parts of the country. I live in the Greater Manchester area and attended my assessment in the Wigan borough.
I have already covered some of my story in a previous post, but to keep it all in one place I have included it again. I have always seen myself as different to my peers in some way, and I had difficulty socialising with others; however, once I did make a friend or two, I tended to stick with them as they become comfortable to be around, so that helped. I met my wife about 5 years ago and as soon as we became involved in a relationship, she started to mention things to me about me potentially having some neurodivergent tendencies. She works with learning difficulties and ASD adults, so has a good idea what to look for. After about a year of pestering me to contact my GP I decided to do it and then the below timeline started:
29th March 2021 - Referral request to my GP
I was asked to answer some initial ‘screening’ questions:
1. Do you have difficulties socialising / interacting with others?
2. Do you find it difficult to adapt to sudden changes / routine in your daily life?
3. Do you struggle with concentrating at work or tasks?
At this point my referral was accepted and I was advised I would referred to a specialist department and that it might be a lengthy wait.
20th April 2021 – Received a letter from the GM Mental Health service advising me that a referral had been received and I was placed onto a waiting list.
23rd May 2022 – Received a letter stating that I was at the top of the list for an autism assessment.
26th May 2022 – Received a letter offering me a face to face assessment appointment on 9th June 2022.
9th June 2022 – Attended the autism assessment appointment, which was a 2 hour interview with an austism specialist and a psychologist and involved quite a lot of questions and a few simple games where my behaviour was assessed; it was nothing too daunting, so don't worry. I was asked for contact details for a close family member who could be interviewed to provide supporting evidence.
4th August 2022 – My mother had a telephone appointment with the autism lead and psychologist regarding my child hood behaviours etc.
10th August 2022 – I was contacted and advised that they had completed their assessment and arranged an online meeting on the 18th August 2022 to discuss the findings.
18th August 2022 – Attended an online meeting to discuss the findings of the assessment and to confirm that my full report would follow.
25th August 2022 – I was enrolled onto 4 online workshop sessions to advise and assist me with the diagnosis and offering support on dealing with that and day to day life in the future. After completing these there are up to 5 one to one sessions available with a specialist to assist and advise me on any personal issues or anything else I need support with.
I haven’t attended the workshops yet, but I don’t think that is relevant to this post anyway, so I decided now was a good time to make this post. I hope it offers some help or guidance to somebody and if anyone has any questions then please don’t be afraid to ask.
Dino
