Late diagnosed

Hi Noodle, I am 37, also late diagnosed. I just got told I was autistic last week, after about three years of self suspecting and researching. I find it interesting that you say you 'finally'got your in-person assessment. Can I ask, how many hours this was? I only ask because it seems the diagnostic process varies so much between councils and services. For example, I had six in-person assessments, lasting over an hour each. That could be because the assessor was struggling to assess me and needed more time to unpick things.

(Ok, reading that back over, it seems as though I could be insinuating that your diagnosis is not as valid as mine. THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT THE CASE. I am simply really interested in different approaches to diagnosis and how it works for different people in different areas of the country.

Anyway, I hope you find this forum helps you in some way. I also felt, not necessarily 'happy' to be diagnosed, but certainly glad that I had some answers as to why life has always seemed harder for me than most other people. It would have been really awful to have gone through months of stress only to be told I was simply weird and incapable of coping with life. Now I feel at least I have a solid ground to begin understanding how my brain and emotions work.

Hi Noodle, I am 37, also late diagnosed. I just got told I was autistic last week, after about three years of self suspecting and researching. I find it interesting that you say you 'finally'got your in-person assessment. Can I ask, how many hours this was? I only ask because it seems the diagnostic process varies so much between councils and services. For example, I had six in-person assessments, lasting over an hour each. That could be because the assessor was struggling to assess me and needed more time to unpick things.

(Ok, reading that back over, it seems as though I could be insinuating that your diagnosis is not as valid as mine. THAT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT THE CASE. I am simply really interested in different approaches to diagnosis and how it works for different people in different areas of the country.

Anyway, I hope you find this forum helps you in some way. I also felt, not necessarily 'happy' to be diagnosed, but certainly glad that I had some answers as to why life has always seemed harder for me than most other people. It would have been really awful to have gone through months of stress only to be told I was simply weird and incapable of coping with life. Now I feel at least I have a solid ground to begin understanding how my brain and emotions work.

I went to the gp in 2023 to begin a official diagnosis as I’ve been self diagnosed over 1year and 6 months as my son was getting assessed and it was a lightbulb moment as I realised that they were in fact describing me 

I had to fill out loads of questionnaires and the developmental history etc and then placed on a waiting list, so that’s what the face to face assessment was about, it was 1 hour long,  

Wednesday I see a psychiatrist as she wants to see if I have comobordities, dyscalculia was mentioned in the assessment as I explained that I can’t tell the time on a clock and I’m very bad at maths numbers are like a foreign language to me 

It is weird how all the assessments are so different. I feel for the people who were fobbed off after a single meeting, or by their GP. Mine was similar to yours. A separate person did the ADOS test. It was very thorough. I don't think everyone gets that. I was even allowed to make corrections to the report. I was so lucky.