Diagnosed with autism & ADHD at 28
How did I get diagnosed with autism and ADHD at 28 years old?
Hi! I’m Tahnee, welcome to my first blog post! I hope it provides insight or solidarity with anyone else experiencing something similar. So here goes…
My entire life, I had no idea that I was autistic or that it was even a possibility that I could be. I always felt ‘other’, a bit ‘alien’, compared to my peers but I thought I was just ‘quirky’. I had quite a strong suspicion that I had ADHD since my early twenties and had kind of accepted the fact. Talking really loud and fast, quick and intense emotions, having all-encompassing hobbies for a couple months where I couldn’t take care of myself (I lost 5kg when I taught myself to sew), struggling to respond to emails or missing them completely and paying bills late, as well as a slew of other things, were all traits that cemented the fact, to myself, that I had ADHD.
The autism traits, however, were not noticeable to me, nor anyone around me. This is where society’s expectations for what autism ‘looks like’ and the kind of people it presents in prevents a large population of autistic people from getting diagnosed. So, when I started getting videos on TikTok about what autism can look like, specifically in undiagnosed adult women who also have ADHD, alarm bells started to ring in the back of my mind. Because of these videos I’ve since learnt that autism can look very different, not just from person to person of different ages, but from men to women. (There’s a lot of reasons why that is, but I’ll talk about that in a different post.) So, when these videos consumed my feed in the early months of 2025, the idea that maybe I was autistic started to wiggle its way into my mind.
At the time I had no intention to get diagnosed, not only because I had ADHD and making appointments is really hard, but also because I was gaslighting myself that I was overreacting. I told myself there was no way I was autistic. I had graduated high school, graduated in a bachelor's degree of nursing and had a successful career in nursing where I was recently promoted to Clinical Nurse Specialist in my area of Anaesthetics and Recovery. Something I was incredibly proud of. I also had always had a group of friends that I was a part of, so I was able to make friends, and I had a successful long-term relationship and was now married- so there was no way that I could actually be autistic.
Until I had another giant meltdown. I came home one night after an evening of drinking (something I had not done for over nine months) and had a very loud and prolonged meltdown of inconsolable crying, classic stimming of rocking back and forth and hand flapping and screaming ‘there’s too many people around, everyone needs to leave me alone’. What’s important to note is at the time I was working as a bartender in a very busy bar where I was feeling very overwhelmed by the environment. (The reason I was a bartender instead of a nurse is because we moved overseas. Story for another time.) From busy Saturday nights serving hundreds of drunk people, to struggling with the management, I was overwhelmed and it was getting to me underneath, even though on the surface ‘I was fine’ and was forcing myself to push through it.
The day following this meltdown, where my husband had to help me through into the early hours of the morning, I was feeling very ashamed. I also thought that there had to be a reason for this behaviour as it wasn’t the first time this had happened. So, with the delusion that TikTok was feeding me the correct videos and with the shame of my behaviour, I searched for a way to get diagnosed.
We all know that getting diagnosed with autism or ADHD in the public system can take years. As I was living in a different country, the UK, where I wasn’t sure how long I’d be living there, as well as being very impatient, I couldn’t wait that long, so I started looking into the private sector. I knew that I needed to find a clinic that specialised in undiagnosed adult women because it is still quite a misunderstood sub-type of neurodivergence that not every psychologist is versed in yet. I wanted a specialist. I found one specialist clinic in the UK that offered a joint autism and ADHD assessment, and it cost around £2900!! (Which is roughly $6000 AUD). I thought it was an extortionate price especially when it was an online assessment and I wasn’t willing to pay that much when I still wasn’t sure if I was autistic or not.
Seeing as I am Australian, and I knew that even our private sector wasn’t that expensive, I thought I’d try looking at Australian clinics. I found at least three clinics that specialised in autistic and ADHD women and chose one that felt right. It cost $2500 (which is roughly £1,250) for the joint assessment, which is still a lot of money, but it was better than what was being offered in the UK. I still felt uneasy about spending that kind of money because I had so many doubts. What if I’m not autistic and I’ve just wasted all this money and I’m just a bad person who can’t control her emotions? But my lovely husband said something that stuck with me and convinced me to go ahead with the assessment. He said, ‘We would spend that kind of money on your physical health, so I don’t see why we can’t spend it on your mental health.’ And he was absolutely right. If me or my husband was sick or needed surgery, I wouldn’t hesitate to spend the money. So, I did.
I booked the appointment for a month's time and I waited, doubts swirling in my mind the entire time. A week before the appointment, the clinic sent a bunch of online assessments to fill out before our zoom call appointment. Going into the online assessments, I thought it was just a few forms to fill out and would take me less than an hour. Oh, was I wrong. It took me seven hours to finish the very extensive questionaries that I tried to answer as honestly as I could. One of the downfalls of autism assessments, I think a lot of people who have gone through this will agree, is that a lot of the questions are yes or no answers, and when you feel like you need context to answer it, it makes filling them out very difficult. I had no idea how to answer a lot of them. Especially because at this time I didn’t realise that most traits can present differently. Questions like, ‘Do you participate in stimming behaviour, e.g. rocking back and forth or hand flapping?’ And all I could think of was that I didn’t do any of those things, so I would click no, not knowing that stimming looks wildly different in every autistic person. So, I found a lot of these questions very difficult. But there was a large portion of the assessment where I could type my answer, which I enjoyed so much more because I could give a detailed response and convey my thought process to the question.
Once those assessments were done, I started curating a list of traits that I have and thought might be traits of someone with autism and ADHD. Because I knew as soon as I started the video call, all thoughts would fly out of my head and I’d be sitting there like a fish out of water unable to speak. I separated the list into four categories; Possible Autism Traits, Possible Stims, Food Aversions and ADHD Traits. A few things on this list included, being told I’m gullible, wearing the same clothes every day, listening to one album or artist for months or years, cheek biting, nail rubbing, hating the idea of eating yoghurt out of a tub and eating fruit without skin that has been touching on a platter. In the lead up to my assessment I would add something to the list when I thought of it or when I noticed it, so by the time the zoom call came around, I had multiple pages of ‘evidence’ or what I thought might be evidence seeing as I still wasn’t sure if I was autistic or not.
Within the first twenty minutes of the video call, the psychologist told me I was definitely AUDHD. After having gone through my detailed online assessments and speaking to me for even a short period, she knew that I was autistic. Let’s just say I was shocked at how quickly she picked it up and was happy to diagnose me then and there when I hadn’t expected to get the results for weeks.
This is probably when I should mention that my assessing psychologist, and the owner of the clinic, is also a late diagnosed autistic and ADHD woman. She was not diagnosed until after graduating with multiple degrees in her field and found it difficult to not only get a diagnosis but have people, even her colleagues, believe her afterwards. Which is when she developed the special interest to specialise in diagnosing other adults in more welcoming and less judgemental environments than what she experienced.
When I told her that I was surprised by the diagnosis, because, again, at this point I still wasn’t convinced, she told me she was very, very sure I was autistic. She said that I fit the criteria easily and she has had clients where she has not been able to give a diagnosis, (debunking the ‘You paid for a diagnosis’ crowd). And let’s just say, the weeks and months that followed the diagnosis did not go the way I thought it would. But I’ll write about post diagnosis in a separate post.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog and gotten a bit of insight into getting diagnosed late as a woman and maybe this will encourage someone to get their own diagnosis!