Thinking an assessment would be pointless

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Keep hearing input from those who raised you is important. Mother is dead. Father is 88 with a patchy memory of my childhood.

At the time I was assessed my father had recently had a stroke and my mother had (and has) some memory issues. The adult autism team who assessed me said that this problem was quite common for adults looking for assessment and asked me to try to find other people who have known me for some time. I did that and they were able to give me a full assessment and diagnosis. So, although input from parents is something which is often asked for it is more than possible to get a reliable diagnosis without that input. Hope this helps.
Jo

Same with me. My Mom's dead and my Dad was largely absentee in my youth.

Perhaps if you have no one who can provide objective input to your behavior as a child then an assessment isn't possible? Maybe that's one of the reasons ASD diagnosis and care options are so prevalent for children but little to nothing for adults?

Perhaps more useful would be examples of creativity and divergent thinking. My life is filled with stuff I've created.

Had no input from my parents in my diagnosis. The diagnostician had access to them but never contacted them.

I was assessed using DISCO and elements of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Diagnostic Interview Guide for the Assessments of Adults with ASD

My partner was present and was very helpful as I am not very self aware. e.g. I was asked if I found anything funny and I said no. My GF said BS and reeled of a list of things I find funny.

Is your sister still going to help? This would help but I don't believe it is essential.

I declined to give details of parents/family members and it was not an issue at all.

I have a younger brother(2 years) and sister (3 years) . I'm not sure they paid much attention to my behaviour , though my sister did score me quite high for the RAADS-R at aspie tests . Both of them live in London whereas I live in Wiltshire.

I'll confess there is also a strong phobic element re getting an assessment. That centres round the fear of a negative assessment (accentuated by the fact that I doubt quite strongly I'd meet the full criteria for a dx)and a subsequent failure to explore other possibilities like NVLD. I know enough to know there is something going on besides mental health problems even if I can't officially diagnose myself.

Basically I'm a coward.

^ I knew it wouldn't be a negative assessment as I would either be diagnosed with ASD or alternative things would be offered. I was told I would be referred on if it wasn't ASD.

I saw my assessment as the first try at finding out what was so fu**ing weird about me; I didn't know. If that say

you aren't ASD then you'll know to go after the other options. They may help with this, they may not. I'd be surprised

if they couldn't (minimum) prod you in the right direction. The person doing the assessment will not just be a

councilor or a doctor who may or may not know a bit about autism (and related conditions) they are people with a

lot of experience within the field.

Just FYI, there's no standard set of practices for conducting assessments -- it's literally whatever the particular shrink or whoever wants to do. So, one might require parental input but another might not.

(It's amuses me a little that a parent's recall is considered objective. In other areas of life they are excluded because of not being considered objective enough, i.e. character reference, trial witness, etc.)

^My mum lied on my forms. I didn't want her to not put anything that might be relevant so I told her that she

could send the form off when it was done so I would not be seeing what she put so to just fill it out as accurately

as possible. Otherwise I thought she might leave things out because she thought (wrongly) that they would upset

me. When she told me she'd sent it off I asked what some of the questions were and one was about strange

behavour as a child and she said "Don't worry, I didn't tell them about the sniffing," (I struggled with the sound

of other people sniffing). In other words she left out anything she thought might be embarrassing.

I don't want an assessment. I don't want another person telling me I can't do something.

Because my father had died 19 years before my assessment, and my mother was in slight decline during my assessment, my ASD clinic agreed to consider my detailed written lifetime behaviors, characteristics and comorbids.

I arrived at my assessment with an inch-thick pile of papers, photographs, previous diagnoses and, of course, my baby book in which my mother had unwittingly described evidence of a few of my earliest developmental disorders.

For those of a certain age, like me, it is probably the best we can do to collect evidence, and articulate our childhoods in detail. If a diagnostician won't consider such evidence in the pursuit of a late diagnosis, move on to other diagnosticians in the hope of finding one who will agree to an assessment without parental involvement.

My own experience shows that it can happen with a little nudging.