Adult AuDHD Assessments in Barnsley

What the Assessment Involves

Step 1: Screening Consultation

We begin with a 45-minute consultation to explore your experiences, concerns, and what you are hoping to understand. This is also an opportunity for you to ask questions and decide whether this assessment feels right for you.

Step 2: Before the Assessment

You will complete detailed reflective questionnaires about your development, current experiences, mental health, and daily life. These forms take time and thought — they are not quick checklists. You are welcome to complete them across several sittings, and if written forms are difficult, we can find another way.

Where possible, and with your agreement, someone who knows you well may be asked to contribute developmental information. This is not because your own account is insufficient — it is because early developmental detail is something most of us simply do not remember clearly. Your account remains central throughout.

Step 3: Assessment Sessions

Assessment takes place in person. Sessions explore your life history, development, attention and executive functioning, communication patterns, sensory experiences, social interaction, routines and flexibility, emotional regulation, masking, burnout, and daily functioning.

For the autism component, the assessment includes the DISCO — a comprehensive developmental assessment — and will also incorporate an ADOS, completed with an Occupational Therapist colleague with sensory specialism. The ADHD component uses the DIVA alongside clinical interview and, where appropriate, a computer-based attention task.

Sessions are paced to suit you. Breaks are always available. You do not need to perform, rush, or present in any particular way. The aim is to understand how your mind actually works — not how you appear under pressure.

Step 4: Feedback Session

We meet to go through the findings together in plain, accessible language. Findings are discussed as a profile — not a verdict. This includes both conditions where present, how they interact, what that means for your daily life, and what support or adjustments might genuinely help.

You will have space to ask questions, reflect, and push back on anything that does not feel accurate.

Step 5: The Report

You will receive a comprehensive written report. You will see a draft first and can request changes before it is finalised.

The report is written in neuro-affirmative language. It will describe your profile — including strengths, coping strategies, and the interaction between your profiles — not simply list deficits against diagnostic criteria. Optional summary letters for your GP, employer, or other services are available on request.

This Assessment Is Not a Quick Assessment

If you are looking for a rapid yes or no, this is likely not the right fit.

A combined AuDHD assessment takes time because the clinical picture requires it. Understanding how autism and ADHD interact in a specific person, across a whole life, while accounting for masking, burnout, mental health, environment, and the considerable diversity within both profiles, is not something that can be done well in a short session or through questionnaires alone.

The assessment is a thorough, collaborative, and respectful process — one that many people experience as meaningful and clarifying in its own right, quite apart from the diagnostic outcome.

Assessment Conclusions

Not every assessment concludes with a dual diagnosis.

Sometimes the picture is complex. Significant traits of both autism and ADHD may be present without one or both meeting full diagnostic threshold. Mental health difficulties, trauma, or other neurodevelopmental factors may interact with or partly account for the presentation. The interaction between profiles may produce a clinical picture that is genuinely difficult to categorise cleanly.

None of these outcomes means the difficulties are not real, or that the assessment has been unhelpful.

Whatever the diagnostic outcome, the assessment will offer a formulation — a coherent, clinically grounded account of how your mind works, what has made certain things hard, and what conditions are likely to support you. For many people, that formulation is as meaningful as the diagnosis itself.

Who This Assessment May Be Right For

You may be considering a combined AuDHD assessment if:

• You identify with both profiles and want clinical clarity

• You have been told you are "too autistic" for ADHD, or "too ADHD" for autism — presentations that in reality frequently co-occur

• You have experienced significant masking, burnout, or emotional exhaustion that has been difficult to explain

• You have a history of anxiety, depression, or trauma that may be intertwined with unrecognised neurodevelopmental differences

• You simply want to understand how your mind works more clearly

In-Person and Location Options

Assessment must include in-person components. Face-to-face interaction supports more thorough observation and a deeper clinical understanding.

I offer clinic appointments at my practice in Barnsley and home visits within Barnsley and surrounding areas. The ADOS appointment may be conducted online or face-to-face in York with an Occupational Therapist depending on individual needs and circumstances.

Clinic address: Barnsley Business and Innovation Centre, Innovation Way, Wilthorpe, Barnsley, S75 1JL

Pricing and Logistics

Fee: £2800 Insurance: Bupa Global accepted — invoices submitted directly (subject to authorisation)

Private pay: Bank transfer Timeline: The full assessment ordinarily unfolds over 4 to 8 weeks weeks, including screening, assessment sessions, feedback, and report writing

Understanding your AuDHD profile

To give you a sense of how we think about AuDHD regulation and strengths, you are welcome to explore these resources from the Neurodivergent Library:

Understanding AuDHD Strengths, Stress and Regulation and Growth — for adults, teens and partners, which acknowledges the interaction of the two regulatory systems and in current regulatory theory and are informed by current research on AuDHD regulation and lived clinical experience.