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Receiving a proper diagnosis is important for a number of reasons. It helps you and those involved with your child to plan the way ahead; it tells people quickly what kinds of behaviours they might expect from your child; and it may open doors to services that you may need for your child.

However, there are some problems with having a diagnosis. It may label your child and people may expect a limited repertoire of behaviours. People may think that a diagnosis explains your child's behaviour when it really just describes it or sums it up on one term.

How do you go about getting a diagnosis for your child?

In most cases assessment centres or diagnostic teams take referrals from a range of sources:

• Your local GP
• Health visitor
• Speech and language therapist
• Physiotherapist or occupational therapist
• Teacher
• Parents

You will then be given a date to attend the clinic.

What happens when you bring your child to the assessment centre?

A range of professionals, probably including an educational psychologist, a medical officer, a speech and language therapist and/or a clinical psychologist, will assess your child.

There are a range of diagnostic tools that are widely used by these centres and teams. These include Griffith Developmental Assessment, Diagnostic Interview for Social and Communication Disorders (DISCO), Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), school observations, language cards, theory of mind test (TOM), Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) and others.

There will probably be parent interviews, autism specific tests, as well as more general observations of the behaviour of your child. All of these tests will be based purely on your child?s behaviour, there will be no medical tests.

The team will look for behaviours in three areas:

1. Communication, that's not only a question of whether or not your child can actually speak, but also how they communicate without words, how they related to you when they want something.
2. Social interaction, that's about making contact with others. The assessment team would be particularly interested in how your child makes contact with peers, children of their own age, but also how they interact with adults like yourself or the professional.
3. Imagination and play, that's about playing fantasy games, pretend games. Most children are able to do this quite early, but children with autism find it very difficult to do pretend games.

These three areas are called diagnostic categories and you can find them under autism spectrum disorder either in a book called ICD-10, that's the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases or the DSM-4, that's the 4th edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual.

The question that the diagnostic team are trying to find out is whether or not your child displays too many or too few of the behaviours expected in these three categories compared with other children of his or her age or if these behaviours are missing altogether.

But ultimately, it's the quality of these behaviours, not just the quantity that they are looking out for.

It may take a number of visits to the assessment centre before the team has enough information to come to a decision.

In most places this decision is based on a multi-disciplinary assessment and discussion.

Uni-disciplinary diagnosis of autism, that is when just one professional makes a diagnosis, is usually not a very good idea, because there are so many aspects to the diagnosis of autism that its best to include professionals from a variety of relevant disciplines.

Most multi-disciplinary diagnosis only take place if all professionals who assessed the child agree that the diagnosis it the right one.

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