A diagnosis one

A quick Google gave the following results.

3 to 4 percent of people in the UK have a ADHD diagnosis.
2 to 3 percent of people in the UK have a diagnosis of autism.

Very far from a majority.

And fwiw, even with my daughter's substantial needs, we don't really get any extra support from the NHS.

We had to fight for a couple of years to make our LA admit she needed specialist provision.

Her diagnosis means she will understand herself as she grows and its a frame of reference I can give to peopl3 who don't know my daughter as to why she behaves the way she does sometimes.

Just like schizophrenia and many other things such as depression, bipolar disorder, are you questioning all these things as well. A professional reviews the evidence and the individual and makes a diagnosis. Do you seriously think people including schools are making up evidence to get diagnosis's as that is what it feels you are implying.

No, we shouldn't be making diagnosis harder.

It's hard enough.

My daughter is non verbal autistic with an underlying chromosomal disorder. With all her substantial needs, she still had to wait two years for a diagnosis, despite it being painfully obvious.

And respectfully, these children are not your own. Who are you to say that they seem fine to you?

We don't give everyone a bandaid when something is wrong with them. A bandaid treats a cut or graze, but it doesn't sort a headache or upset tummy. Instead, we diagnose the problem and implement a targeted treatment. In teaching and learning, we work hard to understand each child's needs and implement appropriate strategies to support them to access the curriculum on the same basis as their peers. In order to do that, we need a diagnosis which allows us to understand the child's learning needs. We don't use surface level assumptions about whether or not a child seems normal, and give them a bandaid if we decide they aren't.

Thank you for this. It's nice to know some teachers fully acknowledge this and have our backs. Parents of send CYP often get such a shit time with all the judgment.

You are aware they you have to have evidence of difficulties right?

Its not largely diagnosed by self reporting, it is usually by school, parents and child. Then a trained psychiatrist reviews all this evidence and reviews the individual to see if they meet the criteria. What you are talking about is that you see these children masking their behaviours, you have no idea what goes on at home for them when they are in their safe place. No diagnosis is easy to get, its is actually very difficult. What a horrible post! Just because you don't see first hand the struggles doesn't mean they are not real.

ND people attract ND people as friends. There's probably some amongst the adults too 😬

I also participate in our ASD diagnostic pathway meetings - and we are bloody harsh on who we will move forward to a screening. We screen out around 75% of people whose difficulties could be explained by other conditions.

It isn't based on self report alone. It's based on reports from the individual, parents, teachers and following assessment by professionals in the field.

This is true for the majority of psychiatric diagnoses. You could swap out breast cancer for depression in my analogy if you like, the point would still stand.

Perhaps overdiagnosis is an issue, perhaps it isn't. I don't know. But none of the tests you refer to has a perfect score for picking up true positives and ruling out true negatives. There will always, always be false positives and false negatives with every test. It's not a reason for ignoring the best methods we currently have available to us to try to get the best care for everyone.

OK I'll bite.

Shall I tell you what it was like growing up as an undiagnosed autistic girl in the 80's and 90's. For I would have fitted your definition of "normal" well enough back then - because I masked to fuck.

Kids are like dogs - they sense "different" and unlike dogs - they can be foul.

Nursery school - I was kicked out because of being late toilet training. No alternative provision or anything - and since it was the 80s, there was no understanding and I was just shamed into sorting it out.

Primary school - no friends, I spent my playtimes squishing up blackberries from the other side of the school field fence into an empty pop bottle (1980s so we were actually sold bright coloured fizzy pop from the school tuck shop). At one point I vividly remember some of the boys smashing my head onto the school playground (and the headmaster spending the time with me in his office dabbing it with a wet paper towel - and when I rang him later on as an adult for something else... he remembered it as well!). I had worms shoved down my t-shirt by one boy (I can still remember his name - and I'm still terrified on wet days when the worms come up to the surface if I see one).

Then the incident on the bus where I "was weird" so I had cigarette butts shoved in my mouth. All the incidents where I just got randomly targeted to be beaten up for being "strange" and the fact I couldn't even sit in my bedroom with curtains open without things being thrown at the window for being a target.

In secondary I was dragged out of the corridor into a classroom of older girls who told their friends "you've got to see this girl, she's so odd"

But yeah - I was "coping" and sufficiently "normal".

Getting my late diagnosis was game changing - I understood who I was and how some of the things I got into trouble for constantly were simply me not being able to navigate the social interaction game of rules. I could half-fake it, but it fooled no one really and just made me a miserable outsider, fed into anxiety, mental health issues, deeply disordered eating because I didn't understand why people didn't "get" me.

It was a fucking grim time, despite the diagnosis rates meeting the OP's sufficiently stringent criteria.

Yes, I hold down a job successfully now (took me till my 40s and being diagnosed to do so though), and I can appear as a slightly quirky professional who gets on well in meetings - but colleagues haven't seen me having meltdowns, banging my head backwards off my office chair to try to sort out the mess I'm in, my speech breaking down and stimming. My colleagues are wonderful and would get it if I did - but it's not exactly office conduct!

The children you refer to with seemingly no outward signs would not be diagnosed if there weren't significant indicators.

Diagnosis is a long and complicated process by professionals, often a team of Ed Psych, SLT, OT and Paediatrician.
The tests and their results make very interesting reading and show why that individual rested is neurodiverse.

It's often not apparrent to a casual observer.

What a load of nonsense. Rather than start a goady thread your time would be better spent actually using Google. A quick search would have told you what tests are done to diagnose and how differential diagnosis works.

Your posts are deliberately provocative.

@CarGoat my dd is 25. Throughout primary she appeared totally normal. Always high performing except at games/anything to do with her hands - awful writing, hated hama beads, etc. But counteracted by exceptional musical ability.

At 14/15 a bit of cutting started. By 15/16 there were some episodes of over dosing and food withdrawal. She couldn't cope with the demands of 11 GCSE's and the constant masking any more and developed gad and depression.

At 17 she was diagnosed with ADHD, some autistic traits but not enough for a diagnosis and later under her own steam, with quite severe dyspraxia. There was zero NHS help or through CAMHS and I dread to think where my dd would have ended up if we hadn't had the money to pay for a consultant adolescent psychiatrist, some day case provision, shed loads of therapy and of course the assessments. BUPA picked up some of the cost, we picked up £8k.

Now, I am pretty sure that when I were a lass and at secondary school in the 70s there was no pressure to get vast clutches of GCSE's, A'levels or go to uni. Plenty of people got two or three. The girls did a secretarial course or cordon bleu Cookery and the boys could still get a job in stockbroking or went into estate agency or landscape gardening, etc. There were different pressures and the neuro diverse slipped under the radar.

The world has changed and vis my own dd, looking back the markers were there but unrecognised. Had they been, they could have been addressed and much suffering would have been spared. She was lucky because we had the resources to buy her help when the NHS wouldn’t provide it.

She recovered, went to uni and is doing very well as a secondary school teacher specialising in SEN alongside her discipline. She manages her neuro diversity.

I thought it better to explain that rather than just write ODFOD.

OP

Why do you think you would be able to tell if your child's best friend has autism ?

What are your qualifications in autism diagnosis, what training have you had, what experience of knowledge of traits that constitute a diagnosis do you have ?
Are you aware at what level the intensity and effect traits have on an individual warrants a diagnosis.

What about co morbidities, how much do you know about those?

Have a read of this, it may raise your awareness about people's perceptions of autism and the reality.
neuroclastic.com/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/

If she had £1 for every person she encountered with your ill informed attitude, dd would not need DLA/PIP.

You must live in an area with an exceptionally high level of diagnostic availability. Any idea of the process and how long it actually takes? Clue, several years from first referral.

Not sure you need a hard hat for this thread, perhaps a dunce's cap would be more appropriate.

I'm so sick of these ableist posts

Let's just stop diagnosing people with stage 1 breast cancer with breast cancer. Only 2 3 and 4 get a diagnosis now, good way to reduce the numbers. Stage 1 can just see how it goes, not sure they really need treatment like people with advanced breast cancer do, and you can't tell they've got breast cancer by talking to them anyway so what difference does it make.