Form filling for diagnosis is broken af*

My ADHD diagnosis has now moved to the next stage. My online assessment with a Consultant Psychiatrist is due to take place in a few weeks and my ASD assessment has started to move a little. But the deluge of questions that need answered before taking another step forward, frustratingly feels like two steps back for someone who's neurodivergent.

As part of ADHD diagnosis, the pre-work before the consultation (ignoring the initial pre-screening survey) involves eight forms being filled in. Two or three friends/colleagues/siblings need to fill out one form. My wife needs to fill out another. A parent has to fill out two forms. After all that, I've to fill out four forms.

The number of things that need to be done is challenging enough, but more so, the content of the forms is mind boggling to me. As someone who struggles with ambiguity in question form (and in most of life), I cannot for the life of me, understand why the questions are as they are. They feel heavily weighted towards making life easy for the people getting the answers, not the people providing them.

If you've got ASRS, WFIRS or WURS on your neurodiversity Bingo card, congratulations, you've got a line... hit me up for your prize. They're just some of the forms that need filled out to give enough starting information.

WURS is the Wender Utah ADHD Rating Scale, which is a set of questions that should be answered based on your childhood. That's a struggle given it was four decades ago, but many of the questions are so open to interpretation or don't make sense (see below) that it was a real challenge for me to even complete them.

When I read the 'question' above all I can do is sing Careless Whisper in my head because I certainly don't know how to answer it. It seems more like a riddle than a question in its own right.

It doesn't get much better in the pre-ASD assessment. There's the expected about siblings, parents and children as well as eye contact and morality.

There's some more questions on things like staying emotionally detached when watching a film (yes) and being very blunt (hell, yes). Then the interesting "When I was a child, I enjoyed cutting up worms to see what would happen" question (not that I can remember). Unlike the guilty feelings, at least that last question is unambiguous. You're either a worm cutter or you're not.

It's not just the questions that cause overwhelm. It's also how I've felt along every step of this journey. Every interaction is one that makes you second guess yourself. Every email, form and telephone call makes you feel like you should just stop. Maybe it's just me, but I constantly feel like someone's accusing me of trying to somehow game the system. It feels like there's as many barriers as possible in place to make sure as few people as possible get through to diagnosis point.

Last week I got an email around my ASD assessment, with a reminder that you need someone from your childhood who can fill in (you guessed it) another set of forms.

It helpfully says: "While we acknowledge that nominating an observer may not always be possible, please be advised that without this or alternative collateral information from your childhood such as school reports or previous assessments, the assessment may not be concluded, or a formal diagnosis reached."

Trying to upload the aforementioned school reports when I did this was a near impossible task and I've a degree in Computing. And for anyone wondering, phrases from teachers like "He has a vast amount of leeway to make up and I very much doubt his ability or determination to do so" were pretty normal on my reports.

But for those people who don't have someone, or aren't comfortable with asking someone from their childhood to fill in their forms, we're just putting another blocker in place to make it harder for them to progress further.

There must be an easier and more compassionate way to get to the point of consultation. Because right now, at every step, it feels like the people who are meant to help us are convinced we're all somehow trying to cheat our way into a broken system. Who wants to be in a whole fucking system that is broken anyway? Form filling en route to diagnosis is broken, what the hell needs to happen to fix it?

*Yes, I'm aware I swear quite a bit