Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment K-ABC Test results...

My son, who has Asperger's, makes fleeting eye contact, and makes more effort at making it when he is in situations with people he wants to make a good impression on, because he knows that it is considered polite. He also told the psychologist who evaluated him that he had lots of friends. He was unable to identify the vast majority of his "friends" by first and last name, and on more detailed questioning, confirmed that almost all of these "friends" are people that he sees at organized activities or knows from online interaction, and that he doesn't get spontaneously invited to their homes, birthday parties, movies, game nights, or other leisure activities unless the invitation is extended to an entire class or organized group, and that the in-person "friends" don't typically initiate social contact (phone calls, voluntary conversations beyond simple social pleasantries) with him. He doesn't see this as not having friends. The psychologist disagreed, and saw significant impairment in development of age-appropriate social relationships. If the psychologist who did your child's testing simply accepted your child's assertion that he has friends without inquiring further into the nature of the relationships, I don't think that is necessarily a fair assessment.

I would be very surprised if the statistical diagnostic makeup of a clinician's patient load was common knowledge. How could the tester possibly know that "9 out of 10" kids who are evaluated by this neuropsych are given an Asperger's dianosis? And even if that number is true, there is nothing in that to indicate that the diagnoses are inaccurate. It may be that this person specializes in evaluating people who are already suspected by other professionals of being on the autism spectrum, in which case it might be an entirely appropriate percentage, with only ten percent of the people who make it to the point of getting an evaluation honestly not having a spectrum disorder. Trying to cast doubt prospectively on the diagnostic competence of another professional doesn't really reflect well on the tester, frankly. If I had my tin-foil hat on, I'd suspect that perhaps a small number of children that this tester diagnosed as having an emotional disturbance or other issue were later diagnosed by the neuropsych in question as actually having Asperger's, and the tester got some parental blowback, and there is some animosity there as a result.