I waited a year for an assessment on the NHS only to have a very disappointing experience - was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or advice?
First of all, the assessment seemed very short. Most people I’ve seen talking about assessments have either had multiple sessions, or the assessment lasted for around 5 hours. I had one two hour assessment, and I had only sent in 2 forms beforehand. One of these forms was the AQ10, on which I scored 9/10, and the other was an early development form, which didn’t allow a lot of space to elaborate on anything.
I am an adult woman, and they said immediately before the assessment officially started that they didn’t take age or gender into consideration, which I thought was a strange thing to say. They then made me do a couple of pattern recognition and vocabulary exercises to check for learning difficulties - I already know I don’t have learning difficulties, and these were the only activities that were done, which again I thought was odd.
I have no clue what diagnostic tool they were using - they asked a few vague and open ended questions about friendships, where I explained that I have had friends but that I have been easily manipulated in relationships and that I struggle to initiate any social contact - I had a lot of examples in my head that I thought may be helpful to put things into context, but I didn’t feel I had a chance to elaborate on things much. They spent maybe five minutes asking me about my interests and routines, before spending about half an hour asking me about past trauma.
They didn’t ask any questions about whether I struggle with tone, expressions, body language, taking things literally etc. They asked nothing whatsoever about any sensory difficulties, or problems with employment or anything like that. They then came to the conclusion that I wasn’t autistic because I’ve had friends and because I was “articulate” and “competent”, which I thought was quite insulting to autistic people to be honest. They put basically everything down to trauma despite the fact that I tried to tell them that my difficulties with socialising and communication predate any traumatic experiences.
I just feel it wasn’t thorough at all and that they didn’t actually listen to a lot of what I said. I don’t have the energy to go through all of this again to try and get a second opinion but it just feels very dismissive and as though they made up their minds very early on based on things that I don’t think should have ruled out autism.
