''Questionable practices'' in Maxine Aston's Work

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I know this is an old thread but I wanted to reply to this post because it caught my attention. I think I may have AS and I'm looking to get diagnosed. When I searched for someone to do it Aston's name was the first to pop up. I called the clinic she works from and they were very keen to book me in straight away for a £500 assessment. No referral or screening questions as before hand, they just said just asked what day and explained the payment options.

This didn't seem quite right to me so I started digging around and realized all she appears to have is a regular degree in Psychology and some basic counselling certificates. A BSc Psychology degree is what some people would call a 'bums on seats' or 'toilet paper' degree, especially from Coventry University. When I found she appears to have no clinical or medical qualifications I thought it was odd, but what do I know? That is when I found this website which finally confirmed to me I should avoid going for an assessment with her.

How she gets away with writing the books and articles she does and claiming to be an expert when she has no form of specialist training I don't know. It seems very wrong to me. And don't even get me started on the made up 'cassandra syndrome', to which I can find no credible reference to, other than her own website.

Maxine Aston is a qualified counsellor but she does not have enough qualifications to make an official diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome. If you get a diagnosis from her, it will be unofficial. I've somewhat changed my mind about her since the last time I posted in this thread but this thread was made when Sheila Jennings Linehan was still writing articles about family law that proposed to discriminate people on the autism spectrum in the family law setting. She is no longer even listed on the FAAAS site and most of her articles seem to have been removed from the internet. This seems to of been a result of the ASAN campaign in 2009, to get Tony Attwood to disassociate from such things.

CADD is a load of nonsense, it can never be an official disorder because it's no different from what happens in any relationship when communication breaks down. The CADD idea seems to have now gone through transformations since I've last posted in this thread. Aston now refers to it as AfDD (or affective deprivation disorder) and refers to it as a "relational disorder" rather than something that only affects the NT like CADD used to, while Karen Rodman of FAAAS has simply renamed it as OTRS (apparently standing for Ongoing Traumatic Relationship Syndrome) but I still don't think it has any valid scientific merit as an actual disorder. I've seen very little discussion of these new incarnations of CADD in the autism community and the ASAN campaign was really the last time I've seen Aston, FAAAS and CADD discussed at length by those of us in the autistic community.