Aberdeen has been suffering for years a local unjust failure of service re such an important basic as adult access to diagnosis. Doctors have not been available for it, folks have needed to seek access to service from other regions unless they had the means for privately. This affecting such an essential life fairness as employment support.
NAS holding a conference there in 2015 budged nothing, nor even prevented the OSS there (which they ran) closing down! But now the local paper has budged the local NHS, as a follow-on benefit from a campaigning victory on ADHD. It reports this breakthrough in NHS acknowledgement of service duty: NHS Grampian commits to adult autism diagnosis.
Why does it say it is important that folks cease to need to present to mental health service? Of course it's important that autistics are not mental, but that service is long established one of the commonest sources for diagnoses. GP referral to it. If Aberdeen folks have been referrable to mental health, and have been diagnosable by it, then there is no form of words that makes sense, that they could use to reject diagnosing the folks who were not going to stay on the mental health service for something else. Yet that is what the article reads like saying they used to do.
The principle of accessing adult diagnosis is importantly universal everywhere, Aberdeen's experience this far into the autism aware era has been staggering. This is the turning point of their acknowledging this principle for a maltreated place.
