Autism Diagnosis in Adulthood

simply reporting the

diagnosis

and I think a limited understanding of strengths and challenges can really result in less personalized support, so that's an important reason to consider it regardless of whether you're a first-time

diagnosis

or someone who has a childhood diagnosis and then finally decides to continue or disclose it. Diagnosis is a really personal decision, so for the sake of time, I'm not going to go over all this stuff about my research program, but the slides will be available, so I'll just post my contact information so you can send an email to the lab. There is also the website if you would like to find out more about the research or clinical services we have if you are local directors.

Thank you very much for your attention and we will be happy to answer a couple of questions if there are any questions. You still have time, thank you very much, yes, we will try to include a couple of questions here. I think you really gave a complete overview, so we didn't really get too many questions, but feel free to keep sending them if you have them. One question we have here is about the continued development of executive functioning skills. Have you seen people improve significantly even in

adulthood

in this area? Oh, that's a great question, you know?

I think in all areas of adult tribe and executive functioning Be one of these, we don't know much about adults at any age, but I think we're particularly lacking information about changes across the adult lifespan. So I imagine that executive functioning could show development, particularly with support and the availability of different strategies. and things for an individual, but that's not an area of ​​pursuit that I know has been studied throughout adult life. I think there is some evidence of improvement from childhood to

adulthood

, but we don't know how stable or valuable it might be. be for adults, okay, so how much did you ask about social skills groups for adults?

Have you heard of them? Have you offered them in your program? Yeah, so there aren't many evidence-based social skills groups. I will say various community groups. providers across the US to offer and social skills groups one   that has some research assistant evidence base  and is frequently recommended is called springs   for young adults and was developed by Elizabeth Logan at UCLA in California   and this has has been a program that has spread quite widely, so it is available and really all over the world it has been translated into several countries and, sorry, several languages, so it is a program that is available and you can go to its website if you are looking.

I think Piers probably

autism

UCLA is pretty easy to find. Find and have a list of certified providers, but you should also know that the materials are available and that any doctor could provide that service. It doesn't necessarily need to be certified. Okay, so you mentioned online quizzes. Could Let's say they are similar to psychometric tests. I guess what would you do if you could talk about the main differences between those two. Actually, some of the online websites that you may find may use questionnaires that we will use as part of them. of the comprehensive assessment, so it's not that they are necessarily different, although you have to be careful, some measures are or some things online are just a series of questions that have not been validated at all, others may not have more kind of investigation. behind them and be similar or exactly the same as the things that we would use in the evaluation, but I think the important thing to know is that in any questionnaire the specificity of the items is not very great, so what I mean by that is that there may be an element that asks about social difficulties and you know, difficulty making friends and that's not something specific to

autism

.

There are many reasons why someone might let you know that you might be showing difficulty in a particular area, so that doesn't equate to dismissal. any quiz doesn't mean they have autism and just because they don't need a cutoff on a quiz doesn't mean they don't have autism either so I think it's really complicated and you know what What I would like to see is is there someone with a certain level of training that is behind this and can provide more context in terms of what specific endorsements or lack of endorsements on a questionnaire might mean.

Okay, I want to be respectful of your time. We're approaching one o'clock, we get a lot of questions near the end, so I'll talk to you about the ones that are offline. I really appreciate everyone sending them, but we just can't respond.