Went to the mental health centre with my parents yesterday. Turned out the folk had gotten an ASD suspection herself, too, and that was why she wanted to see my parents. I could’ve known that she suspected one of those disorders with onset in childhood cause why else would she ask to see my parents, and an ASD sounded most logical to me (but well, you know the power of laypeople looking at mental health info), but I didn’t know in advance why she wanted to speak with my parents. Don’t know if it was an advantage or a disadvantage that, consequnetly, neither did my parents. In any case, they were quite cooperative, to my surprise. Of course, my father’s first remark was to say “So what?” to the ASD thing, but the folk clarified that it wasn’t so much meant to label me, but rather to determine if there was a possibility for treatment. We all also agreed that, while the staff problems at training home had been what led us to consult the mental health centre, it obviously wasn’t only a staff/client problem - if it were, I’d have left this place voluntarily ages ago. So the folk had some questionnaire which she administered to my parents - well, in fact my father was the one answering most questions cause a lot was about early development, which he knows more about since he was a stay-at-home Dad. I sometimes made a remark in between. Overall, I think the discussion went a lot better than I’d expected. Bottom line was that the folk did see some treatment possibility and asked me if I agreed. I obviously did, but wondered about the June 1 thing, cause of course they have a waiting list. The folk, who didn’t seem all that happy with the whole leaving training home thing in the first place even though I tried to be as objective as possible, said it would be no problem, cause they could hand over my case to Nijmegen once I was there. So that was a good thing. Discussed the situation with Arda today and she seemed to agree to my decision sort of.
