What really happens when we diagnose autism with Danielle Drinkwater

And I was involved at various different stages of the process.

So for one organization, I was involved in the initial assessment, more of a generic assessment before they went on to the more focused autism assessment across the age ranges, so working with adults and children.

For other services, I was doing the, mostly the ADI, actually, the parent interview, as part of a multidisciplinary team again.

So you usually team up with a speech and language therapist or an occupational therapist or someone.

Yeah.

So there's, there's different, um-

And the, the ADI is a developmental interview, so you're asking parents questions about a child's early development, aren't you?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Going into quite a lot of detail about-

History

...

the different-

Developmental history

... developmental history and various different domains that we might be looking at in terms-

Mm

... of an autism profile.

Yeah.

I, I was in it for the long haul.

You know, I was really, really invested in this financially, professionally, personally.

I really wanted to understand this, and I'd...

I suppose my assumption was that, uh, uh, so I, I would have questions about what we were doing and things that didn't quite seem to add up for me, and I found it really difficult to get a straight answer on those from peers and colleagues and supervisors.

What sort of questions?

So for example, it would be things like maybe a question about whether someone really did meet the criteria for a particular item on an, on an assessment or questionnaire such as the ADI.

Mm.