Diagnosis

ManyStripes said:

If you can't specifically get a diagnosis of an ASD, can you at least get professional, clinical confirmation that you do have particular problems, symptoms and difficulties?

I don't know. Surely the same problem applies. They have not given me a diagnosis because they don't believe i have provided enoguh evidence to support that. So I don't know how they would support anything else they can't identify. Nor do I know how Ic ould get a second opinion: there's no one else available to assess me. So it would be the same people assessing me again.

If there are other diagnostic methods then I don't know what they are nor how I could persuade the clinician to employ them. The only tests were conducted were as follows:

1. I had to read a small book that comprised only pictures with no text and explain the narrative. The pictures were of frogs floating past houses on lilypads. Like a kids book (presumably intended to diagnose children).

2. select from a bunch of items that looked like they came from christmas crackers and construct a narrative employing each. I'm a creative person but felt exceptinally silly doing this.

3. watch a clip of four people having a dinner party and answer questions related to the subtext. The clip was not real, it was acted and also dubbed from a continental language. It was also painfully predictable to anyone with half a brain (the person that person a fancied actually fancied person b - like a cheap sopa opera). I questioned the value of this at the time for the above reasons. How can responding to a fake scene tell anything.

4. answer a series of questions to each of about 20 different social scenarios, similar to the one above. These were text based with the clinician reading them out at the same time. Some were obvious, others were not. Some also were ambiguous meaning that a number of different answers applied, or that the answers were painfully contrived.These sorts of things are easier as an adult if you have the intellect through experience to understand what is meant. They dont' speak to the difficulties i experience either.

5. look at series of photographs of faces croppped to show only the eyes, and then pick from a list of associated emotions to guess the correct one. Apparently noone gets this 100% and the fact the images are cropped is utterly unrealistic (i don't see people as cropped images, i see their whole face), and the nature of the cropped pictures means that any number of different emoptions could apply.

along with a brief and entirely superficial interview that didn't get to the heart of any of the problems i have comprised the diagnostic process in lieu of a developmental history. I have no idea if my reactions are typical of ASD people or if they mean anything. I don't think these tests are representative of anything personally. But then what do I know?

ManyStripes said:

If you can't specifically get a diagnosis of an ASD, can you at least get professional, clinical confirmation that you do have particular problems, symptoms and difficulties?

I don't know. Surely the same problem applies. They have not given me a diagnosis because they don't believe i have provided enoguh evidence to support that. So I don't know how they would support anything else they can't identify. Nor do I know how Ic ould get a second opinion: there's no one else available to assess me. So it would be the same people assessing me again.

If there are other diagnostic methods then I don't know what they are nor how I could persuade the clinician to employ them. The only tests were conducted were as follows:

1. I had to read a small book that comprised only pictures with no text and explain the narrative. The pictures were of frogs floating past houses on lilypads. Like a kids book (presumably intended to diagnose children).

2. select from a bunch of items that looked like they came from christmas crackers and construct a narrative employing each. I'm a creative person but felt exceptinally silly doing this.

3. watch a clip of four people having a dinner party and answer questions related to the subtext. The clip was not real, it was acted and also dubbed from a continental language. It was also painfully predictable to anyone with half a brain (the person that person a fancied actually fancied person b - like a cheap sopa opera). I questioned the value of this at the time for the above reasons. How can responding to a fake scene tell anything.

4. answer a series of questions to each of about 20 different social scenarios, similar to the one above. These were text based with the clinician reading them out at the same time. Some were obvious, others were not. Some also were ambiguous meaning that a number of different answers applied, or that the answers were painfully contrived.These sorts of things are easier as an adult if you have the intellect through experience to understand what is meant. They dont' speak to the difficulties i experience either.

5. look at series of photographs of faces croppped to show only the eyes, and then pick from a list of associated emotions to guess the correct one. Apparently noone gets this 100% and the fact the images are cropped is utterly unrealistic (i don't see people as cropped images, i see their whole face), and the nature of the cropped pictures means that any number of different emoptions could apply.

along with a brief and entirely superficial interview that didn't get to the heart of any of the problems i have comprised the diagnostic process in lieu of a developmental history. I have no idea if my reactions are typical of ASD people or if they mean anything. I don't think these tests are representative of anything personally. But then what do I know?