If you want to have an assessment to find out whether you are autistic, you better hope that you live in the right place. It really is a postcode lottery in Britain these days. If I lived seven miles down the road, I would be able to have a referral to the Adult Aspergers team who would carry out the assessment in a fairly straightforward way; albeit with a long delay. The waiting list is currently over a year. Where I live the process is more complicated. I could go to my GP and ask for a referral and he could agree to do so but the next step is where things would stall. The local Clinical Commissioning Group would receive the referral and make a decision whether my need for an answer is worth putting forward in excess of £3,000 for an assessment to be done. As there are requests for life saving treatments and medications competing for the same pot of money and I am functioning enough to look after my children and maintain employment the decision to refuse the assessment fee is a foregone conclusion. I work for the NHS in the mental health field so I know the system from the inside. This is what led me to seek a private route for assessment and diagnosis.
I waited six months after contacting the psychologist’s office partly because I needed to save up the money to go private. I’m a single mum so my wages are usually spent as soon as they arrive. The other reason for the delay was fear; what if this wasn’t the answer to explain why I’ve never belonged? My desire to know outweighed my anxiety and early this year I booked my four-hour assessment (two x two hours) for early February. The night before my first assessment session, I managed to whip myself up into a tearful frenzy by getting mixed up with the appointment times and time zone confusions. With the help of a kind and patient friend this was thankfully sorted out in time for me to calm down and prepare for my first meeting with the psychologist over Skype. I found the whole assessment process to be a compassionate and therapeutic experience. She was extremely thorough, using a number of different tools and sources of information in order to gain the information she needed to make a decision. When I received my diagnosis of Aspergers, the psychologist explained how she had come to that conclusion and we spent some time discussing what happens next. As the female presentation of Aspergers is so little recognised it is not unusual for people to cast doubt on the diagnosis when someone comes out to them as Aspie.
Once I had said goodbye to her and switched off my iPad, I sat a moment unsure how to feel. My initial delight and excitement gave way to a shaky, tearful kind of limbo. What did all of this mean? I didn’t have long to reflect as I was due in work so I spent the journey thinking over who to tell and wondering what kind of reaction I would get. This blog gives me the opportunity to describe my coming out process and how I go about growing into this newly confirmed part of my identity.