Oh dear. Firstly, if you had the initial letter saying that you were on a waiting list then it's extremely unlikely that you have been forgotten about. Personally, I would phone the hospital again and ask what the situation is. Make sure you get through to the right department and ask them to check that you are on their system and then ask how much longer an appointment will be. If it's a long way off, or the person is unable to say then I would go back to my GP, say how distressing the whole situation is for you and ask him to contact the hospital to upgrade the urgency of your referral.
Best of luck !
Good news on the appointment front
I honestly don't think they forgot, you'd be surprised what a bit of pressure from a GP can do !
Good luck with your appointment !
After the meeting I spent about 90 minutes filling out a dozen surveys and tests on a computer.
What sort of tests?
They were quite similar to the online tests for Asperger's, only these had various different topics and ranged from 20 questions to well over a hundred. The topics included ADHD, autism/asperger's, my general physical and mental health, depression, etc. You just had to answer by clicking on agree/disagree, or picking the answer from a range of 1 to 5 that best suited you.
I hate when there is no button for "I don't know"
I showed up yesterday alone, and the psychiatrist told me I actually had to bring my parents too.
Well gee, what do they do about people who have no living parents?
It is what it is. The psychiatrist said that in order to diagnose someone with AS he needed 2 vital symptoms: social and communicative problems, and problems with empathizing.
I wonder what criteria he used to define what those would consist of.
this entire thread angers me!! I understand that in some cases a mental diagnosis is harder to nail down than a physical one. For example, the dr. will not need to talk to your parents about a broken arm!
But seriously, this is out of control!
I was given a diagnoses be a friend who happend to be a psychiatric social worker, so it was an 'off the record' diagnosis, but she assured me that it's Asperger Syndrome.
After reading this post and others, I'm really tempted to give her a call and get lined up for an official one!
Courage. Marshall University had to do my psychological inventory over again a year later (April 1997, first run was March 1996). No one is perfect.
Perhaps the issue of whether Asperger has to be packaged with skills in math, science, engineering or computers, as suggested by the Wired article the Geek Syndrome, is for another thread. My extended family's (Marsh) Asperger certainly is. My older uncle taught math (high school I think). My younger uncle was a chemist. My brother and I are computer programming professionals.
I am convinced Mom thought the both of us gifted first and special education second. She certainly wanted children, and was denied them by the will of God for a decade.
Brains run in the family. Mom was a top college student. So was her older sister still living. My brother earned an Air Force ROTC electrical engineering scholarship to Virginia Tech (the fact that he resigned his ROTC scholarship almost immediately was only due to his culture shock for military life, my brother was in it for the money, because Dad fussed about Mom made him send me to college on campus and he couldn't afford my brother. By the way, Dad could have sent us both. Mom's retirement, the longer of the two, was only 15 years. But we hoped it would run into her 80s, certainly, we were only denied that by the will of God too).