Has anyone here been formally assessed and told no?

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I am in the UK and there is a rise in private assessments and I cynicism that they diagnose everyone who pays them. Its a direct payment.

How could that be?

Diagnostic doctors need to report your quantitative testing scores (hard data), and provide a significant amount of evidence from your childhood.

Are you saying they fake the numbers?

People's answers and testing results are stored.

Mine were cross-verified with an agency in another country for double-verification (whatever that's called).

Because when someone pays for a specific assessment they are already shaping their answers. The actuarial measures assume that people are being honest. Some assessments are done online with forms filled out in private, some of which can be practiced online.

It may be a local thing, but people are being diagnosed with ADHD from online questionnaires.

It depends on what the diagnostician decides to do. Some are much more thorough and much more knowledgeable than others so many people do end up getting misdiagnosed

The testing I did didn't involve those kinds of subjective questions. Subjective questions such as "Why do you think you're autistic?" can obviously be faked. My testing relied on lots of mathematics and spatial puzzles almost like an IQ test. I had to answer using a computer (in front of her) and the results were tabulated with standard deviations and T-Scores. I couldn't fake the answers to those kinds of questions because I didn't even know what the "autistic" answer was supposed to be. Very little of my assessment involved interview-style questions or conversation.

Maybe it's different where you are but my ASD assessment was very thorough, almost 12 hours with Neuropsychologist, and my ADHD took nearly 20 hours with a Neuropsychiatrist. Those people have to be accountable by backing up reports with hard data and rationale. In my case I was even able to provide anecdotal reports from my teachers and speech pathologist which had been written 45 years prior. I had home movies from the 1970s. I had reports from my employers. None of that could be faked.

Some people do get told no, of course. I'm just saying that I can't imagine a reputable doctor would fake it for money. They'd actually earn more if they said no, and the person tried again a second time with more childhood information.

Last edited by IsabellaLinton on 27 Jan 2024, 2:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

False positive or negative?

I have heard of many people getting diagnosed as bipolar or of having a personality or mood disorder or even being diagnosed with multiple simultaneous conditions when they were actually Autistic. They spent years trying to treat the wrong issue but the treatments never worked. After digging deeper and finding competent diagnosticians, they found out that they were Autistic and everything about Autism fit.

A well designed test will ask questions in multiple ways to detect inconsistencies and other indications that the subject is faking. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to fake your way to a diagnosis, but that the medical establishment is well aware of that possibility and most certainly takes advantage of test design strategies to prevent it.