Question my family thinks I have autism how do I get tested without insurance?
Sorry to say, and this is not a diagnosis, but that's more common for anxiety and depression than autism.
The reason for why you assume this makes a big difference.
Unfortunately anxiety and depression are also very common comorbidities in autism, so there's that overlap too.
No single question, or even single form, would be enough to tell whether someone is autistic or not.
You know, detail-oriented thinking as in autism can make it a lot easier to fixate on specific negatives or anxieties compared to neurotypicals.
Of course, going to a professional for a real assessment is the only thing I can really recommend. This would certainly be strong supporting evidence though, and meets my standard for self-diagnosis.
It was a joke, but there's something to it. People's autism can manifest in many different ways, but from what I have observed:
- Language seems full of ambiguity. ('How often is "often"?', or 'Concentrate on the full picture? It depends on the picture!')
- Reading too much into a question, so everything sounds impossible. ("How can I really know if someone is actually bored or pretending to be bored?")
- Questions from a neurotypical perspective seem absurd, since your experiences are so different. (Adaptive behaviors like assuming people are bored could make this seemingly simple yes/no question irrelevant.)
There's probably more.
Anyway, the tests on that site usually have some commentary (before the test itself) that helps explain some situations where you may get hung up on which answer is "correct".
It's worth noting that the "allistics" who cooperated with me on this had no difficulties whatsoever with any of the answers and found the questions more or less absurd and completely unrelatable.
Rather dramatically different experiences of the world, apparently.
When I was tested for autism, my interviewer requested my wife be there specifically to help answer some things which I did not understand fully and didn't have good context for. It was helpful both for the diagnosis and to open the door for my wife and I to have better conversations about my needs.
... The irony of autistic folk having needs but having considerably more trouble communicating those needs, especially while burnt-out and needing more, is it's own, considerably large, domain.
In the end, provided you've been functional in society so far in your adult life, a diagnosis won't change _you_.
What a diagnosis can do is lead to an in-road for specific types of therapy designed to help you cope with specific symptoms and/or navigate through social life.
But that kind of therapy is not free in the US.
I recognize myself in lots of things that are described by some people having autism and out of curiosity I ran an online test once that basically said that I might but it was also clearly not definitive. But more often than not I didn't really know where to put the cursor between totally agree and totally disagree so I answered some of them very randomly.
From what I understand if you are not neurotypical there is very little that can be done and I don't think it should be considered a disease to be slightly different. I honestly prefer not to know as I don't think it would help me in my struggles regardless of the result and if I was I am not sure I would want to be labelled as such. YMMV of course.