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ASD diagnosis rejected

Mia151515

Hi everyone,

Today I had my feedback from my ASD assessment and i've been told they're not diagnosing me and they think my symptoms are just down to anxiety. 

As you can imagine i'm extremely upset about this and been crying all day as I know deep down that I am autistic after doing nearly 2 years of research reading medical books, listening to podcasts and speaking with other autistic people. They told me to speak to my GP to possibly up my antidepressants and speak to them about anxiety (which i have already been doing for 9 years and they've got me nowhere). I can only imagine this is down to the assessment criteria being so outdated and not suited to late diagnosing autistic women. 

I am now looking at going down the private diagnostic route as I am not happy with my result from the NHS. 

I was just interested to see if anyone on here had any experiences with private ASD diagnosis' (either alone or following from a rejection of NHS diagnosis). Or if there were any recommendations, tips or advice to cheer me up as I dont have many other people to talk about this with so feeling pretty low Disappointed

Thanks in advance !!

Parents

  • If you are going down the private route, my advice would be to find someone who specialises is late diagnosis in women or high masking women (if you are high masking). I'm sorry you've had this experience with the NHS. I didn't use them myself but my assessor specialised in female Asperger's (as it was known at the time) and she got it bang on. She could identify masking and knew how to subtly being out autistic traits, like when she told me something about her pet cat to see how I responded (she knew I had a cat). Instead of asking her further questions, I started talking about my own cat, apparently NTs wouldn't do this.

    You may not be autistic but if you strongly feel you are neurodiverse I think there are places who will assess for ADHD as well, maybe even other conditions at the same time, rather than just autism. This may be useful for you as a lot of conditions overlap.

Reply

  • If you are going down the private route, my advice would be to find someone who specialises is late diagnosis in women or high masking women (if you are high masking). I'm sorry you've had this experience with the NHS. I didn't use them myself but my assessor specialised in female Asperger's (as it was known at the time) and she got it bang on. She could identify masking and knew how to subtly being out autistic traits, like when she told me something about her pet cat to see how I responded (she knew I had a cat). Instead of asking her further questions, I started talking about my own cat, apparently NTs wouldn't do this.

    You may not be autistic but if you strongly feel you are neurodiverse I think there are places who will assess for ADHD as well, maybe even other conditions at the same time, rather than just autism. This may be useful for you as a lot of conditions overlap.

Children
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