what have I overlooked before seeking an assessment?

When it dawned on me, a few years ago, that I might be ND, I voiced my thoughts to a friend. She was was studying educationa psychology and had a low-masking ex and son. She told me I couldn't be autistic because I wrote novels that deomonstrated understanding of people and that I couldn't be ADHD because I'd taken aphetamines in my youth and been affected by them. As I put a lot of trust in the few close friends I have, I stopped thinking about it. However, lately I've been unable to ignore it and mentioned to my closest friend about ADHD. Now, she's probably ND herself and her husband has strong autistic traits... but the last thing I expected was for her to suggest I look at autism first.

Now, once I'd researched, I agreed with her. I've done the AQ50 and a couple of other tests and couldn't believe my score. I told myself I'd cheated - it's easy to do, having studied theoretical and applied psychology and taken a number of tests over the years. I tried to be honest and, to tell the truth, more and more of my past was surfacing into a new light. All the reasons for doing things in a certain way - the strict use of towels and bedding in a certain order, as a tiny example - were looking increasingly like excuses disguising a more primitive need. The problem was - I'm in a health authority (in Scotland) which has closed the door on most autism assessments and won't assess for ADHD. And besides, I'm 72, female and high masking, coping highly successfully until a major burn out after retirement swept my feet from under me for 6 years. I hav no family alive who knew me as a child, and those childhood friends are long gone from my life.

I have picked someone for a private assessment, but I'm stuck on the threshold of making an appointment for that intial, exploratory telephone call. I'm telling myself that I haven't researched enough, or there's too much material and I won't remember it, or that I'm a fraud/ too marginal to bother - or any reason. I think I need to do this in order to get over the imposter feeling, but taking that first step rouses all my anxiety. What should I do before booking anything? What have I overlooked?

Parents Reply
  • I know that some other people here have talked about their own childhood recollections having been accepted.

    My assessors did get input from my parents, and from my school reports, but I have a terrible memory myself and can't remember much at all from my childhood. So I asked my GP for my full medical records, to see if there was anything useful there. 

    They were helpful both in helping me to remember various things, and in containing evidence themselves (for example, of sensory sensitivity as a child, to an extent that prevented me from being examined properly).

    For me, it was important to get copies of my full records for me to review myself, because I knew what kinds of things I was looking for (being armed with a good understanding of autism).

    My GP surgery had initially misunderstood my records request, and someone there had gone through them and - based on their more limited understanding - sent me copies only of things that related to my mental health issues.

    Info for accessing them in Scotland, in case you'd like to do the same:

    NHS Inform (Scotland) - Health Records > Accessing your health records

Children
  • Bunny, that's really sweet of you and very helpful to others, but I doubt my childhood records would tell me much because (a) we're talking about the 50s and early 60s, when attitudus were very different (b) I suspect (looking back in the light of what I've learnt) that my parents were autistic and they shied away from authority and (c) my physical health in childhood dominated everything. About the one intersection might be my disastrous two terms at boarding school which must have produced sufficient stress for my parents to override the usual advice of "give her time to adjust" to get me out of there and into the local school. But I was never interviewed and my mother's behaviour would be more likely to have stimulated notes about her than about me.

    I think I will have to take my chances.