Autism diagnosis

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So I was recently diagnosed with autism at age 21.. or so I thought. My therapist did testing with DSM-5 criteria which I thought was good enough to be an official diagnosis. However an appointment with my primary physician today to discuss medication which was for BPD (improper diagnosis) made it seem like only psychiatrists or neuropsychological testing could provide an official diagnoses. I scheduled a neuropsychologist test with this news but it will take months to complete and get results. What if the test says I don’t have it ? And what am I supposed to do in the mean time. In order to receive accommodations I need a diagnosis but it will take months to get one ?? I’m confused please correct me if I’m wrong or point me in the right direction

Hi and welcome to WP. I'm sorry you're going through all this confusion.

I'm not American so I don't know exactly how it works in Ohio, but I'll do my best.

Can you talk to your therapist and ask them to refer you somewhere with a bit more urgency? Do you have a written report or opinion from your therapist that could be stamped by your GP? I've heard that in some places, a GP can read and authorise a report by a practitioner who doesn't have the proper diagnostic credentials. In that respect they are putting their "MD" degree onto the report by stamping it with their own licence number. I don't know if that's possible in Ohio, but you might want to find out.

Unfortunately the wait is usually quite long for assessments worldwide, and normally diagnoses need to be made by neuropsychologists like you suggested.

I hope you'll stick around here in the meantime for support and ideas.

It depends on the type of accommodation you need, some places will accept that and some of them won't. Your therapist who diagnosed you should be able to give you details and help with the specifics though!
I was diagnosed very recently in the same way so I don't really know exactly what's next either.

U.S. NIMH: "Autism Spectrum Disorder"

I was diagnosed by a psychologist who worked with autism. She was able to get me into her schedule about a month after I called. She had my diagnosis within a month of our first meeting (though it took awhile to get the diagnosis in writing...that could be because she knew I didn't have an urgent need to get it in writing).

The delay I ran into was bad information from my insurance company. When I asked for a referral for an adult autism assessment they quickly sent one, uh, actually, they quickly sent me one that was useless because it was to a place that did not do autism assessments. My insurance provider wanted to help but they were apparently unfamiliar with adult autism assessments and did not know who should do one. That confusion cost me months. I think the problem is that relatively few adult autism assessments are performed so they lacked experience with the process. They incorrectly said I needed a psychologist with ABA credentials. It turns out that psychologists don't typically have ABA credentials and do not need ABA credentials to do the assessment.