Adult disagnosis in the UK - without parent/teachers/family

Post Reply New Topic

I am trying to seek a diagnosis for autism now that I am an adult. From what I have heard from multiple sources it isn't possible unless someone can correlate your stories of early childhood. My Mother is schizophrenic and has delusions and thinks autism doesn't exist when she isn't making jokes about it. I socialized so poorly I had to be taken out of school within a few weeks of attending - instead of that bringing up red flags all my concentration was surviving a father who was verbally, physical and sexually abusive towards me.

Have any adult autistics in the UK got diagnosis without the backing of their family? How do adult autistics who have survived extreme abuse, orphanhood, the care system, abandonment or neglect ever get diagnosis in the country?

Why has there never been a conversation that maybe a child's home can be so abusive and neglectful that their disability is entirely overshadowed and we suffer in silence. With every time we have some supposed tantrum (really a meltdown) is misunderstood and causes us to endure more abuse from the very thing that makes me overload in the first place.

Yes...I have no parents to support me but I was diagnosed as an adult in the UK.

What evidence did they require for your early childhood development? Is it enough for me to write down my experiences

I was diagnosed as an adult in the uk last year without any support from family.

It looks like there are different techniques in different areas of the uk though.

IF the dx team is similar to mine, they ask an awful lot of questions.

I'm fine with a ton of questions just as long as they result in something at the end.

At this point in my life a lot of things have been delayed.

My further education was delayed by three years (I caught up and now have a job in tech)

I was only diagnosed with sight problems last year

I feel as though my abusive upbringing delayed my progress massively

Having parents attend an autism assessment isn't required unless the assessed individual is a minor. Individuals who are adults may, of course, include one or both parents, or older siblings to help describe early impairments in more detail than the individual might provide, but, again, they aren't required. If the assessed individual has convincing evidence and memories to allow for the complete assessment of their early developmental years, most diagnosticians will accept what the individual describes to them.

An interview method whose acronym is "DISCO" is used -- they ask extensive questions and I assume they are trained to discern consistency or inconsistency of answers, to dig deep and frame questions in a varying ways due to the fact that the person being diagnosed is necessarily having to self report their life history. I had this method and I'm in the UK. I also brought along a detailed (I mean ridiculously detailed!) list of all traits I believed I had and have historical and to the present, categorized by type and by age period. I wrote down every memory I've ever continuously carried with me that is still with me in the first place because it was a "What's wrong with me?" moment, from my earliest memories onward, as I have a vivid memory that goes back to a very young age. I also brought old family photos, literally the actual physical old 1960s items, not digital or anything that could be faked -- some of what I have couldn't look more spectrummy if you were making a Hollywood movie about a kid on the spectrum and fabricating "awkward family photos 101", lol. Seriously.

It's probably much closer to ideal to be able to bring along either a family member or a friend who has known you fro the earliest age possible, to verify early behaviours, as diagnosis is based on criteria that has to be present and evident in childhood, not just suddenly recently (in which case whatever the person is experiencing is probably something else).

The ideal is another person's testimony but you can be diagnosed as an adult all alone, you just have to try to think of, write down or bring everything you can to the assesments. The clinician will take care of the rest in the form of extracting from you a fuller picture, including questions about any historic well-functioning and not just your poor functioning, other diagnostic history, and they should also screen for other conditions or disorders in order to effectively rule those out. This is my experience in the UK.

I was diagnosed at 43 ( in the uk ) without anybody else.

Because I don't want anybody else to know that I have issues. Literally nobody knows, as far as I'm aware, because I keep everything to myself about my various problems.

I live with both parents and kept it all hush, hush.

i was dxed without family. my partner attended however.