Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all,
First post here and I'm looking to see if anyone has run into a similar situation to mine in the assessment process.
Had my interviews a month or so ago and recieved the assessment letter this week. I'm pretty confused by the write up really.
The 1st interviewer says I fit the criteria. The second interviewer says It's not possible to reach a diagnosis due to chronic pain since childhood (i'm mid 40's now).My reading of this, and my partner's is that by logic alone it's difficult and unlikely to be diagnosed with ASD if you have chronic childhood pain.So the diagnosis summary says No.
My brain has slipped into a freeze state, errr. i honestly don't know what to do with this. It's neither of the outcomes I had anticipated. I really thought i'd get a Yes or No, lol. I'm laughing but it's also comically not funny.I guess i could ask for a second opinion on this, or walk away and make my own decision. I don't really know why but i think i want some kind of validation if it's likely, Not sure what to do atm.Has anyone else had this experience?Thanks for reading,Paul
I would ask for a second opinion.
I've had chronic pain since my teens, talked about it during my assessment, and got a very straightforward autism diagnosis. If anything, the nature of my chronic pain conditions was another box ticked for my assessors, because they're conditions with known links to autism.
There are lots of issues causing chronic pain from childhood that are comorbid with autism, like irritable bowel syndrome and hypermobility. Because of that, I would be pretty concerned if an assessor was ruling out autism based on a person's experience of chronic pain- and then of course there's the fact that people can (and often do) have multiple unrelated things going on!