Newsflash: Ben still has autism

In April a psychologist diagnosed Ben with high functioning autism.  I did not think her evaluation was thorough and I did not trust her results, so I had him re-evaluated.

I called in the big guns this time and contact UNC Chapel Hill. We live about an hour away from here: http://www.cidd.unc.edu/  They agreed to do an evaluation and Ben left at 7:30am and returned at 4:30pm.  Other than the hour drive and hour lunch break, we spent the whole time with me answering questions while Ben was evaluated, as well as having a feedback session at the end.

The end result is that Ben met the ADOS-II criteria for autism.  They mentioned that Asperger's is no longer in the DSM, but Ben presents more like a child with Asperger's.  In fact, their number one recommendation is speech therapy focused on pragmatic speech: http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/pragmatics.htm.  This helped fill in the blanks for how Ben keeps testing as not having a speech delay, but many people do not understand what he says.  They noted that he talks a lot and gave them lots of information, but he did not understand how a conversation works.  In addition, his speech went off on unrelated tangents.  He was asked about a picture with a pool and he started talking about how he used to cry in the pool but then he got a light sabre and cut a hole in the pool and the SLP said she totally lost him after that.

There will be a long report coming with lots of recommendations.  Dave just shrugged at the news and said "we knew he had autism already."  That is definitely true, but I am still in denial about needing to track down ABA for Ben, but they told me he needs it.

The other big finding is that they see no evidence of ADHD.  In addition, he had some cognitive testing and his scores were very average (101 and 103) but there was scatter.  All in all, I am anxious to read the report.