If you came here looking for an autism evaluation, I want to answer that in the first sentence rather than the last. I do not provide one. I do not assess for autism and I do not diagnose it.
I am writing this down so you do not have to make a phone call to find it out.
Why people end up asking me
Usually because the search results are a mess. "Autism therapist Eugene" and "autism assessment Eugene" return overlapping lists, and the distinction between someone who can work with you and someone who can put a diagnosis in a chart is not obvious from a directory listing. That is not your failure. The categories are genuinely confusing from outside.
Formal autism assessment is generally done by a psychologist, a neuropsychologist, or a developmental pediatrician for younger children, sometimes as part of a multidisciplinary team. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor, which is a different license with a different scope. A counselor's letter is not an evaluation, and I will not pretend otherwise, including in situations where it would be convenient for both of us.
What I can actually do
Quite a lot, as it happens, and for many people it is the part that changes daily life.
- Work with you or your child directly, whether or not a formal diagnosis ever happens
- Help you understand what you are seeing, and what it might be asking for
- Help you prepare for an assessment, including what to bring and what to expect
- Work with the aftermath of one, which is often harder than the appointment
- Help you ask a school or an employer for accommodations that are reasonable
- Support parents while the waitlist does what waitlists do
Thirty years around autistic children, teens and adults, in classrooms, homes, independent living and vocational settings, means I have watched this process from most of its sides. I have sat with families before an evaluation, after one, and in the years when nobody could get one at all.
On not waiting for the label
A diagnosis can unlock services, accommodations and sometimes funding, and for many people it is worth pursuing for exactly those reasons. It also carries real weight for self-understanding. I am not talking anyone out of it.
But the support itself does not have to wait. Regulation, sensory load, transitions, communication, burnout, self-advocacy and the exhaustion of masking are all workable now. Plenty of people do this work while a referral sits in a queue, and plenty do it having decided that a formal assessment is not what they want.
If assessment is what you need
Ask on the free 30-minute call and I will tell you what I know about who in this area does evaluations and roughly what the wait tends to look like. That is a useful outcome of a consultation, not a wasted one, and it costs you nothing.
