Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi everyone my name is Pauline and I am 47 years old,I recently did an AQ10 questionare and it came up high for Autism which I had suspected for sometime,I contacted my Dr who basically said that it's very difficult to get a diagnosis and you would need a family member to corroborate what I was like as I child,the problem I have is because I am older both sets of parents and grandparents have passed away and my half sister and myself are estranged and she didn't grow up with me anyway.my GP isn't really interested in helping and said she can't refer me just solely on the AQ10 test so I am now at a loss as to what to do?any advice would be appreciated.Pauline.
Explain to your GP how your life is affected and make a list of things that affect you. Change GP if necessary, I’m in my 50’s and don’t have a parent to fill in the questionnaire.
My GP referred me and the NHS assessment centre has said that my wife can write a letter about what she has noticed about me. A parent isn’t necessary. So if I don’t have a living or capable parent then I can’t be autistic? Don’t give up, my forms and letter was actually posted off this morning. My wife ended up writing 3 A4 pages, she joked that she has enough material for a sequel.
Its very inexpensive for a GP to just ignore you, have you thought about putting everything down in an email, I do this as I can come back to it before sending it. Once you start to process everything you find that you have more than enough ammunition. A lot of what my wife wrote, I thought was normal things to me, they apparently aren’t.
If you have around £1,000 available, you can get a private assessment with no need to involve your GP. It should take about a month, or less, to get an assessment, it can be online.
The diagnostic criteria require evidence of 'problems' existing from an early age, but this is not a legal case requiring 'courtroom levels of evidence', it is just a clinical assessment, and requiring older people to have parents alive to corroborate is just nonsense. Like any medical condition a case history from the patient should be sufficient. I had no living parents and I just stated how I behaved as a child and what I remembered my parents telling me about their memories of me as a young child.
I would have a look at the DSM V criteria for ASD diagnosis, go through all the separate aspects, for each criterion then write down the traits you have that fit, add all you can think of concerning past and present incidents of you displaying these traits. Create a document and take it or send it to your GP. Also include how your traits negatively affect you at the present time.
Take more tests online - AQ50 and RAADS-R - and include the results.
NAS81771 said:Dr who
that guy is a time lord!!! lolanyway, yeah as a adult we get ignored, autism is mainly only for child support it seems. they dont care as soon as you are a adult. i dont know what you can do, our health services are terrible, our GPs never care. to be fair when i was a kid they didnt care or notice anything then despite how off rails and crazy i was, they probably notice things better now but its just raw luck you was born in a time just before they started at least attempting to spot mental health issues in kids, but in adults it is still ignored as no one cares about adults, even if we pay tax.