'll just add that most long-term psychodevelopmental diagnoses change and refine over the years. There's a tremendous amount of overlap of symptoms and signs for various things, and as a person's circumstances change, some of them are more evident than others. Throw in a developing child and you end up with multiple diagnoses, more often than not.
Example: at seven, the developmental pede basically looked at us and said "ASD vs NVLD...we could go either way, which one serves your purposes more precisely?" Now, at fourteen, we're pretty much at the point that, on even days I think my daughter's diagnosis was spot on, on odd ones I think we're somewhere else entirely.
This is why it's so desperately important, when putting together an IEP, to design it for the child and not the diagnosis. Schools are very fond of saying "well, autistic kids (or kids with ADHD, or kids with sensory issues, or crooked feet, or whatever) need this thing and this and this". What we need to be saying, though, is "Kevin does A, B and C and has difficulties with Q, so these three things, maybe not that one, and perhaps this one, changed up a bit, would be helpful for him."
Not to hijack the thread, but I want to thank you for this post, which was helpful to me. I feel like my DD looks different almost by the day--right now the depression/anger seems much more prominent and I'm not seeing much of the ASDish stuff, and then I remember how she used have a lot of SPD symptoms that seem to have gone away almost entirely--and it can seem very dizzying. It's somewhat reassuring to know that others have a similar experience.
