Our school system has a neuropsych on staff, or at least 1 they contract with; however, I can't find one associated with the closest children's hospital. Our pediatrician's office gave me the name of a developmental pediatrician, but they didn't know anything about neuropsychology (I spoke with one of the office workers or maybe a nurse.)
Do they have an autism center at the children's hospital? They should have appropriate diagnostic people on staff.
It's also fine to start the process with the school's neuropsych. (That's rare; our schools tend to have M.A. psychologists who just do basic testing.)
he spends a lot of time trying to figure out people's motivation for their actions.
Is that because it's not apparent to him why other people do what they do?
I guess I worry about misdiagnosis because our other ds has just been accurately diagnosed with a medical condition that was misdiagnosed several times over the course of many years. He has some permanent damage because he wasn't treated for the right condition, and we don't know the results of all the medication he took over the years.
That is so frustrating. And it would definitely color your opinion of the medical profession, wouldn't it.
In the case of adding an AS diagnosis (if that's appropriate) to an existing ADHD diagnosis, I think your experience would be different. You might or might not be adding new meds (depends on whether your DS is suffering from anxiety with the AS)-- but you wouldn't have to if you didn't want to. And I think you'd get a sense from the diagnosing doc of why they are deciding what they are-- so it would make sense to you. (If it doesn't make sense, ask more questions...)
DeeDee
ETA: List of tests you might expect to contribute to an AS diagnosis:
Stanford Binet 5 (cognitive)
Woodcock Johnson III (academic achievement)
WIAT-II Word Fluency (academic achievement supplement)
Children's Memory Scale (memory)
VMI-V (visual-motor integration)
NEPSY Social Perception (social awareness/understanding)
ADOS (autism diagnostic observation schedule)
Vineland (adaptive behavior - parent report)
PDDBI (ASD characteristics - parent report)
CBCL/TRF (general behavior - parent/teacher report)
PLSI (pragmatic language - teacher report)
