I met the consultant at my autism service yesterday morning, which is the last part of my assessment. This meeting was 1-1 with him and he was really, really outgoing, which are two things that help me interact with others better (the other assessment parts had 2 people in there, and they were normally friendly and I feel like my social skills were much weaker there). I'm very clumsy at verbally explaining my problems etc so I'm already feeling *** about not being able to put my case across properly, but then the consultant also completely disputed my mental health diagnosis saying that he is not convinced I have what I'm diagnosed with, and that because of my history it's understandable I have problems dealing with/ expressing my emotions, so now I feel really confused about a lot of things. To top it off, at the end of the interview, the consultant made a comment about how when he looks at all my collated information from the whole assessment that he'll probably see some traits of autism, as if to say that many people have traits but that doesn't mean they're autistic.
Now I feel like I completely blew it. I need the diagnosis as a validation of my experiences and to help the people around me understand me and my problems. I'm waiting to get an appointment for the review meeting at which I'll be told whether I get a diagnosis, but I'm so scared that they'll refuse to diagnose me based on my meeting with the consultant, especially because I'm pretty high functioning and some of the more stereotypical signs of autism aren't very severe for me, but I know in my heart that I'm on the spectrum...
