Final assessment

Hi Claire,

My assessment was last year and was a personal history, self-report, completion of a questionnaire from someone who knew me well. (They did want someone who knew me in childhood but that was wee while ago ).  My understanding is that there was also a conversation between the psychologist and my line manager from work.

After an initial interview I attended a face to face assessment (we were in-between lockdowns) which was a series of relatively simple cognitive tasks to test my language, comprehension, creativity and social interaction skills by a clinical psychologist with a specialism in autism and a speech and language therapist. It felt a little unusual, due to some of the things I was asked to do, but I didn't find it stressful - perhaps a little disorientating because it was a novel situation and I found it difficult to adjust.

Had a zoom call, probably a month after the assessment to confirm I was on the spectrum and I had some feedback about the things they picked up on. A full report came probably about a month or so later which contained everything they'd captured which I was allowed to scutinise and amend before the final copy. I was also given an abridged version for work which just contained some general observations and recommendations on how best to support me.

My clinical psychologist has been great - so after the initial assessment I had 3 follow up sessions to address any issues I wanted to discuss and I'm able to book ad-hoc sessions to cover any things that come up. I went private (the company operates as a social enterprise) and I was given recommendations for reading material. Other strategies and techniques to help manage myself better I've picked up through my own research and putting aside my usual coping strategies (masking) and thinking about where I really struggle and devising some more supportive coping strategies. A lot of the time this is general good practice - downtime after social interactions or in-between tasks, practice turn taking in conversations (rubbish!), giving myself time to do things, learning when to say "no" or eject myself from a conversation, check in with my mood - it's all good day to day stuff, it's just a little bit more important for me to do it then regular folk.

I'm working with my diagnosis. So at the moment I'm looking at how I'm managing general uncertainty and how I can function better with the dynamics in group discussions at work  - both of these I find incredibly stressful. (I tried discussing the dynamics of group discussions with a manager who kept talking about the purpose of the meeting, who was on it, and what they did when people got upset, etc when really I was looking for social psychology theories so I could understand how people worked together to come to a consensus. Frankly I was disappointed - there's books that have been written on this stuff!)

My psychologist also advised that for me there was no "score" (unlike the self-report screening tool which set me on this course - I used the AQ10 which is pretty good at predicting an autism diagnosis if you score over the threshold, but not so good at distinguishing people who are likely to be diagnosed as autistic from those who aren't). The diagnosis had come from a series of observations and reports of certain behavours from the face to face assessment, interview and questionnaires that placed me on the spectrum. 

Not much I can add other than apart from the pause from initial referral (thanks Covid) it all went pretty smoothly.

Thank you! I'm so sorry I didn't reply, I didn't get any notifications of replies and forgot to check after the following day  I was given my diagnosis during the video call! 

No worries, sounds like things went well for you. 

No worries, sounds like things went well for you. 

I definitely had the Imposter syndrome leading up to it but I'm glad I went through with it x