Autism Assessment

Neuro-affirming autism assessment in accordance with NICE guidelines and based on the DSM-5 criteria

If you think that your child, or yourself, might be autistic, I can help you to think about the best way forward and to arrange assessment, if you decide that this is what you want to do.

Autism Assessment involves:

A Developmental History

e.g., ADI-R (Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised), which is carried out with parents and looks for evidence of autistic features in childhood. This can take up to three hours.

The ADOS-2

(Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2), which is carried out with the child, young person, or adult. It looks for the same areas of evidence as the developmental history, which are based on the DSM-5, but it looks for them live, in face-to-face interactions that occur during the assessment tasks. This takes an hour to administer.

Evidence from another source

e.g., nursery, school, other professionals who have been involved with the client, such as psychologists, counsellors, occupational therapists.

About Lucy

Lucy Sanctuary considerable experience of carrying out autism assessments

I have considerable experience of carrying out autism assessments in the NHS and as an independent practitioner. I assess all ages, e.g., infants, children, teenagers, and adults, and I have a lot of experience of assessing complex clients. For example, assessing individuals when there are other conditions involved, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), learning difficulties, mental health conditions, e.g., obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, social anxiety disorder, depression.

I am extremely experienced in assessing girls that camouflage differences, and often present with extremely high levels of anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, many self-harm, and many are out of school.

Working with young autistic people therapeutically has increased my knowledge and understanding of autism, and this feeds into assessment. I always have a therapeutic caseload as well as carrying out autism assessments and I am an ADOS-2 trainer.

Assessment Pathway:

Referral

You can contact me by email: lucysanctuary@protonmail.com.

Phone call

I will arrange to call you to discuss your referral and to get some background information to help us decide what is the best way to proceed. I will always tell you if evidence is more suggestive of another condition, or if there is insufficient evidence for autism assessment as I do not want you to spend money on an assessment unless it is necessary and it is going to help you and your child.

I can refer you on to clinicians who assess for other conditions or give you advice on best next steps if we decided that autism assessment is not appropriate currently.

Autism Assessment

I will introduce you to my colleague, who will arrange the developmental history with you. We will send out information for you to fill in, and book a date for the ADOS.

Feedback

When we have carried out the developmental history, the ADOS and we have all the information back from questionnaires sent out to you and others, e.g., school, we will arrange a feedback meeting to go through the diagnostic conclusion and how we reached it, and to discuss support for home, and other settings, e.g., nursery, school, university, employment.

Report and recommendations

We send out a detailed report with recommendations for home and for nursery / school / university / employment, and a summary report so that you do not have to share personal information with others. The GP needs to have the full report, but it is up to you if you share the full report with others or not. You can comment on the report and ask for corrections and amendments and when you are happy, we issue the final report.

Joint meeting about support

We arrange a zoom meeting with school / university / employment, if you want, to discuss support. This meeting can be extremely helpful and positive and increase understanding of conditions needed to help you or your child reach their potential.

Multi-Disciplinary Team

I do autism assessments with a range of different clinicians, e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists and paediatricians. They are all highly experienced and extremely knowledgeable. We all have considerable experience of working for the NHS as well as working in private practice.