Relevant.
NSFW:
I am beginning to think I should probably be formally tested.
Many common issues that he cites are mine as well.
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That is some truly awful spinning of valid results. I think i hate it.
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Therapy to help autistic kids deal with the world, interpret social cues and etc is a very good thing. Claiming to “cure” or “fix” them is bullshit that needs to die in flames. They don’t need fixing, they need understanding, and often patience. Those are free.
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Same reason we don’t get diagnosed with ASD.
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Looking into ADHD evaluation/testing. Lead time is 8-10 months to get an initial appointment at the more prominent behavioral health practices. A small practice has appointments available in less than 2. I have no word-of-mouth recommendations at all, nor from primary care.
Is the screening fairly standardized? Does it depend on the interpretive skills and experience of the practitioner? Is a larger, more comprehensive practice a better bet than a smaller one? Prioritize timely access to the screening?
I’d appreciate opinions, experience, thoughts from anyone who has been through the process. PMs are fine too.
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My experience is with ASD, not AD(H)D, but everything I’ve heard is that
- All psychs are booked solid for approximately the rest of time right now. Public, private, general, specialist, whatever country you’re in, doesn’t matter. They’re all running at about 150% capacity. (Can’t think why, he says looking around at everything.)
- There are standards for testing these conditions, but there may be differences in skill applying and interpreting these tests. Specialists in AD(H)D will have more experience in knowing what they’re looking at.
- I imagine there would be an interview and history part, and an IQ test part.
- The interview and history may involve extended sessions getting to know you and read your responses, and may involve talking to family members or long term friends.
- the IQ test is not looking for your IQ, it’s doing what the IQ test was originally meant to be for: testing lots and lots of semi-independent skills and traits, and looking for characteristic patterns where some trait’s score is abnormally out of whack from what you’d expect from the other scores, high or low. The point of this testing isn’t to rank you against other people, it’s to rank you against yourself.
- It can be expensive, because done properly it’s not a simple or a trivially procedural thing. It takes a skilled professional to do the testing and interpret the results. (Sometimes they know as soon as you walk in the door, but they still do the testing so that they have some other basis for saying so other than “'cause, like, you just know it when you see it?”) That said, if they can’t do the testing to an adequate level of skill, they shouldn’t be offering the service.
As far as whether to prioritise timeliness: is this for yourself, or for a child? If you’re looking on behalf of a child, then quick access to a diagnosis can mean quick access to accommodations at a critical time of development. If it’s for yourself (I’m guessing you’re an adult), then the urgency is probably not as great, and you can afford to wait.
IANAD, so this is just from my (similar but not identical) experience.
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I really can’t improve on that answer.
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The team harmonized results from the AOSI and ADOS — identifying which items on each tool measure core diagnostic traits — to track changes in those traits over the whole study period. Then they analyzed how similarly the AOSI and ADOS measure these traits for boys compared with girls, as well as how well each item measures these traits for each sex.
They found that initiating joint attention is a weaker indicator of social-communication abilities for girls than for boys, for instance, and that stereotyped and repetitive behaviors more strongly indicate a high score in the area of restricted and repetitive behaviors for girls than for boys.
“That tells us if we use a sum score that isn’t accounting for those differences, we might be comparing apples to oranges,” Burrows says.
After accounting for these measurement biases, they identified four subgroups, based on how the children’s social-communication issues or restricted and repetitive behaviors changed over time.
Within each group, the sex ratio was nearly 1-to-1. The work appeared this month in Biological Psychiatry.
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Excellent reporting, and confirms my long-standing suspicion that he sex difference was a factor of the tools rather than the condition. Like many, many things attributed to sex or race in medicine. We are getting better, just wish it moved more quickly.
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Em Rusciano talking about being adult-diagnosed ADHD.
As an adult diagnosed autist, there were so many things she described which were a mirror of what has happened in my life, of thoughts in my head.
It’s a half-hour talk followed by questions. It’s worth watching. Seriously. All of it.
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While I’m here:
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When I learned that rejection sensitive dysphoria was an ADHD-associated trait, it made my whole life suddenly make sense. This might have been what prompted me to pursue a formal ADHD diagnosis.
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