Is an Autism Assessment Right for You?
Imagine spending your life trying to fit in and never quite making it work.
You might have had many attempted relationships that didn’t get as close as you wanted or you may have lost friendships and not known why. This is often the experience that autistic adults have.
While many autistic people are identified and diagnosed in childhood, many are not and can go through life struggling to understand why they don’t fit in.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that can cause significant difficulty in social interactions, emotional regulation, communication, and sensory processing. It is common for autistic folks to seek out mental health support not knowing that their brains function differently than expected.
Often people who were not diagnosed as a child will spend their childhood and young adult years trying to behave like the people around them and as a result develop depression, anxiety, stress-related illness, eating disorders, and substance use disorders.
Our goal at Amenda is always to work with you as a whole person. We have many treatment options to support your physical and psychological health, but sometimes the most helpful treatment is actually to do a clinical diagnostic interview. You may have developed negative self-talk and shame-based stories about why you don’t fit in. But instead of being a broken normal human, what if you are a normal autistic human?
The first step towards healing is often learning who you are and being intentionally yourself. We want you to be able to tell the most generous story about who you are.
Reasons to consider getting assessed for autism:
Self-Compassion
A diagnosis can help you reimagine the stories you tell about yourself. Past "failures"—the party you left early, the job you couldn't keep, the friendships that fizzled—are no longer evidence of a bad personality. Instead, they become logical outcomes of having different sensory and communication needs from your peers. Knowing your neurotype can make the difference between fighting yourself and accommodating yourself. It’s much easier to forgive yourself for needing noise-canceling headphones when you know your brain processes sound more intensely than you expected.
Communication, Community, Advocacy, and Accommodation
Though external resources (like state funding or specialized clinics) are scarce for autistic adults, a diagnosis provides the vocabulary to find a community. It’s hard to look for "people who feel weird in grocery stores," but it's easy to look for "autistic sensory processing."
Finding your people validates that your internal experience is a shared human variation, not a fault of you as an individual. It can become easier to ask for support when you need it, too. It may become easier to ask your partner for more rest between events or to make a secret signal to leave the party when you get overwhelmed. Diagnosis can also open up avenues to request accommodation from work or school for additional time on testing or written instructions instead of verbal.
Treat the Root Cause
Many autistic adults enter the mental health system and are treated for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) or Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). However, if the "anxiety" is actually sensory overwhelm, or the "depression" is actually autistic burnout, standard treatments like exposure therapy or certain CBT techniques can actually be counterproductive or even traumatic.
It is vital to differentiate the different causes of similar symptoms to make sure you are getting the right treatment and support. We need to respect your neurology and not just treat symptoms.
Reimagining Productivity
If a trip to the grocery store costs 5 "energy points" for a neurotypical person, it might cost 50 points for an autistic person masking and managing sensory input.
Understanding your sensory and energy needs will help you manage your time and tasks more effectively. If you know that the grocery store will wipe you out without accommodation, you can plan more effectively around the trip and wear headphones or make sure you have plenty of down time before and after.
If you need time to rest after an event, you are not lazy, your nervous system needs time to recover.
Authenticity as Health
From a purely wellness-based perspective, masking (the effort to appear neurotypical) is a significant stressor to the body. It keeps the nervous system in a state of chronic fight-or-flight.
A diagnosis provides the "permission" to stop masking. Dropping the mask lowers cortisol levels, improves sleep, and reduces the risk of long-term chronic illness associated with stress. Autistic people also frequently experience a high prevalence of co-occurring physical conditions, such as:
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) or Joint Hypermobility
Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS)
GI issues and food sensitivities
Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS)
When you identify that you are autistic, these "random" physical ailments often start to make sense as part of a larger systemic picture, allowing for more comprehensive medical advocacy.
It is common for folks to think about pursuing diagnosis for years before scheduling any assessment. At Amenda we work with you to decide how you want to approach diagnosis so the process and the outcome helps you meet your goals.
We can help you sort whether self-diagnosis, an informal clinical diagnosis, or a formal diagnosis makes the most sense for your needs. And we will continue to work with you after diagnosis to help you figure out your next steps as you learn to accommodate for yourself and ask for what you need.
