Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all,
My informant completed the ADI-R today, and they called me when it finished and told me what they had said. A lot of things don’t match up to my experience - for example, they said I can carry out small talk (I struggle massively with this), that sounds didn’t bother me as a child (I used to run away from the hoover/cover my ears, and would cry during storms because of the noise) and that I don’t mimic people (I’ve been doing this my whole life, to the extent even my accent can change). I scored over the threshold for all areas, except for 1.
I feel I strongly identify with a lot of autism traits, and when my informant told me the assessor felt a lot of my symptoms sound like social anxiety, I don’t think this matches me, I feel it’s more than that. I found my ADOS-2 assessment so overwhelming, I couldn’t complete some activities as I got so stressed I cried.
Does anyone have experience with below threshold ADI-R scores and still getting a diagnosis? Until today, I was convinced I’d be diagnosed, now I’m not so sure.
Thanks.
I don’t know what my mum put on my form but I was still diagnosed as having ASD, specifically Asperger’s, despite insufficient evidence of autism when I was a child because I met all their other criteria. This may however been influenced by the fact I was 50 and my mum was 84 when I was diagnosed so neither of us could remember that much about my childhood.
Thank you - my informant is 60, so still has a decent memory of my childhood. I’ll just have to wait for the feedback appointment to find out.