Re: Useful
> Whilst getting a referral from my GP was quick and relatively painless, I'm still waiting for an actual appointment ...
Hang in there.
I went to my GP a while ago and asked for a referral. Excuse me if this reads like you're looking in a mirror, that's how the stories from some other ASD people read to me. Pretty well as long as I can remember, I've always had this feeling of "something isn't right", always been "socially awkward" and had to suffer (as commented by others) "normals" desperately trying to get me to socialise. I've tried a couple of the tests that are around on the net, and even allowing for an element of "knowing what the desired answer is" still scored a long way into ASD territory.
My GP didn't know what the route was, gave me a short questionnaire to fill in, made another appointment where he looked at the results and decided it looked like I was that way, and I heard nothing for months - IIRC it was 6 months or more. Then completely out of the blue I got a letter inviting me to an appointment.
It turns out that my timing was fortuitous - had I asked just a couple of months earlier I'd have been referred to the other side of the country, but my county had just set up it's own adult assessment service and I was one of their first clients (client ? patient ? customer ? what the heck !)
If you get a similar service, you'll probably meet with more than one member of the team which has specialist nurses and clinical psychologists. My clinical psychologist said he found me interesting as a case - I'm not quite sure what to make of that !
During one of the sessions I commented that they probably saw fewer younger people these days given the different attitudes these days to when I was at school. I was surprised to find they still get a lot of 18 year olds who've gone through school and never been diagnosed.
Later, talking to someone else, it was commented that schools have a vested interested in pupils not getting a diagnosis. Once a pupil has a diagnosis of anything, then the school is required to give them appropriate support - but they don't have the funding for that and so it's in the school's interest not to get things diagnosed !
Assuming you get a positive diagnosis, our service offers a number of post-diagnosis sessions to explore what it means, what it means for you, how to understand yourself and how you work (that's darned hard !), and how to explain to others what they can do to help you (such as being more direct, being more specific, and relying less on inference (such as saying "now" rather than "when you get 5 mins") if you want it doing now).
It also qualifies you for assistance from Access to Work. In my case I've got funding for coaching sessions with an outfit called Genius Within.
Depending on your work situation, it can make big differences there. ASD is a recognised disability so all the discrimination laws kick in and your employer has a legal duty to make reasonable adjustments. So if you have a knobhead of a "manager" who persists in relying on inference that you don't get and making it your fault that you don't understand his "simple questions"* then that's no longer a matter of having a knobhead for a boss, it's now a discrimination case in the making if they don't do something about it.
* Eg, how the fook am I supposed to know that when he asks "how many <somethings> do we have ?" that he isn't actually after a number ?
That wasn't the sole reason he's no longer my manager. The fact that I had a couple of months off diagnosed with Stress and Depression and cited him as a significant factor also influenced it, as did the fact that the workforce has halved in size over the last year or so and the people leaving cite him as a factor ! He's now tucked away back in his own corner of the business, and actively kept out of managing the business - and as far as possible, from dealing with customers who also don't like him !
Biting the hand that feeds IT
