Assessment process...looking for some reassurance

Hi Amshep,

There seem to be huge variations in how long this whole process takes – here it was just three questionnaires and perhaps 2 hours 1 to 1 with a psychologist and the result straight away… So I can see that being left in that limbo isn’t great. Regarding your outcome, let’s hope you get what you want if this is what you would find useful, but if you don’t it doesn’t really mean it’s not useful for what you would like a diagnosis for. I would assume that you get some report that goes through all the areas they assess and says how they think you do in all these areas. So presumably the things that are causing you problems and where a diagnosis would be helpful to explain things to others will still appear in there as areas where you struggle and perhaps with friends these autism traits you have got are a more useful thing to explain why you behave the way you do than some bold label “autistic”. Especially if it’s rather borderline people around you may not take that diagnosis particularly serious anyway because it doesn’t really match what they expect autism to present like. Don’t know what you need to explain to others around you, but getting such a report that will (hopefully) make it clear that you don’t do the things you have trouble with intentionally to annoy them or whatever might actually be quite helpful for people you are close to. One situation where a diagnosis would be of advantage is when you need help at work, but otherwise I can’t really see a big benefit of that comprehensive label (if any). For a child this would be more important because it may or may not entitle them to support, but for adults who can function reasonably independently there doesn’t seem to be much help you would miss out on.

Perhaps it’s easy for me to think like that because I wanted to get what you fear and getting what you want was a bit of a disaster for me… But I guess they could easily have decided otherwise. For example nobody had told me before that the way I speak is unusual in any way but the psychologist found that I make strange breaks to find the right word. Well, we did talk about things I very rarely talk about, so perhaps if we had done this in German (which is my native language) I would have been more fluent… Or she asked me if I sometimes correct people when they say or do something wrong. Yes, I do that if I think it is important. Would it not be quite strange not to do this? Or I can get so absorbed in something that I forget about the time – it doesn’t happen very often but is possible – is that really something that doesn’t happen to normal people? All these things were used as diagnostic criteria and I guess they could just as well not have been used. The difference between getting the label or not is not necessarily that big really…

Hope you manage to accept whatever the outcome is and make the best of it because that’s one issue with these assessments, that there is no support really if you struggle with the results. Perhaps it helps a bit to post what happens and how you get on!

Hi Amshep,

There seem to be huge variations in how long this whole process takes – here it was just three questionnaires and perhaps 2 hours 1 to 1 with a psychologist and the result straight away… So I can see that being left in that limbo isn’t great. Regarding your outcome, let’s hope you get what you want if this is what you would find useful, but if you don’t it doesn’t really mean it’s not useful for what you would like a diagnosis for. I would assume that you get some report that goes through all the areas they assess and says how they think you do in all these areas. So presumably the things that are causing you problems and where a diagnosis would be helpful to explain things to others will still appear in there as areas where you struggle and perhaps with friends these autism traits you have got are a more useful thing to explain why you behave the way you do than some bold label “autistic”. Especially if it’s rather borderline people around you may not take that diagnosis particularly serious anyway because it doesn’t really match what they expect autism to present like. Don’t know what you need to explain to others around you, but getting such a report that will (hopefully) make it clear that you don’t do the things you have trouble with intentionally to annoy them or whatever might actually be quite helpful for people you are close to. One situation where a diagnosis would be of advantage is when you need help at work, but otherwise I can’t really see a big benefit of that comprehensive label (if any). For a child this would be more important because it may or may not entitle them to support, but for adults who can function reasonably independently there doesn’t seem to be much help you would miss out on.

Perhaps it’s easy for me to think like that because I wanted to get what you fear and getting what you want was a bit of a disaster for me… But I guess they could easily have decided otherwise. For example nobody had told me before that the way I speak is unusual in any way but the psychologist found that I make strange breaks to find the right word. Well, we did talk about things I very rarely talk about, so perhaps if we had done this in German (which is my native language) I would have been more fluent… Or she asked me if I sometimes correct people when they say or do something wrong. Yes, I do that if I think it is important. Would it not be quite strange not to do this? Or I can get so absorbed in something that I forget about the time – it doesn’t happen very often but is possible – is that really something that doesn’t happen to normal people? All these things were used as diagnostic criteria and I guess they could just as well not have been used. The difference between getting the label or not is not necessarily that big really…

Hope you manage to accept whatever the outcome is and make the best of it because that’s one issue with these assessments, that there is no support really if you struggle with the results. Perhaps it helps a bit to post what happens and how you get on!