Well

[white_hart]

I got an email today to say that my screening questionnaires had been reviewed, and I am now officially on the waiting list for an autism assessment.

The waiting time is about 18 months, so it's not going to happen any time terribly soon, but maybe by the time I'm 50 I will actually know if I'm autistic or just a bit crap at life.

Comments

[lnr]

Oh god, when you said locally you can do self-referral I wondered if that might be something to try, but it looks like in Cambridge

- speak to GP, and get referral
- get a letter back from the adult autism service
- fill in lots of forms within 4 weeks
- *if* they think you qualify for an assessment they will put you on a waiting list
- every 6 months they will tell you where you are on the list
- when you are 3 months away from an actual assessment appointment they will write to you again

Good grief. I don't know that I'm neurodivergent *enough* to need any sort of diagnosis, and probably not to go to that much time and effort for it :(

I'm really really really glad you could self refer! Hope the appointment does come in due course and does help.

[white_hart]

Most of the process for ours is the same, apart from being able to self-refer - so once I'd submitted my referral form they sent me the screening forms and said "you must return these within 4 weeks", and having assessed those they've decided that I qualify for a formal assessment. I didn't find the forms too bad - it was basically two multiple-choice questionnaires, very like any online "autism tests" you might have done, plus a third which was supposed to be filled out by someone who knew you as a child - and the thing that really made the difference to me was not having to go via my GP. (I find it hard to convince GPs that I'm depressed even when I'm suffering pretty much constant suicidal ideation, so I don't rate my chances of convincing one that I'm autistic.)