Self-Assessments

you want to track, over time, the severity of depressive symptoms and how they respond to therapy or life changes.

• →A single depression-severity score (0–27)
• →The safety item handled separately, with care
• →An evolution line when you retake it

anxiety feels constant or hard to name, and you want a clear marker you can return to.

• →A single anxiety-severity score (0–21)
• →Longitudinal repeat to see the direction

you want to put into concrete words how much and how you "adjust" socially — not just the vague sense of "playing a role".

• →Three subscales: compensation, masking, assimilation (25 items)
• →Your score is read against two reference points: the autistic and non-autistic adults in the authors’ study
• →A high score reflects real effort, not something to fix

you want to tell depression, anxiety and stress apart instead of feeling them as one wave.

• →Three separate subscales: depression · anxiety · stress
• →An axis profile (radar) showing where it presses most
• →Comparative bars across the three dimensions

you want a first clear signal about autistic traits in adulthood, across several domains at once — not just a guess.

• →Fourteen items, across the social, sensory, and attentional domains
• →A score of 14 or more suggests a full autism assessment is worthwhile
• →Can be influenced by anxiety or masking — worth discussing together

you want a clearer picture of your relationship with body signals — which facets are a resource and where you need support, not just a general impression.

• →Eight facets of interoceptive awareness (37 items)
• →No "good" or "bad" scores — a profile, not an evaluation
• →A reflection tool, not a diagnosis

you want to separate types of obsessive-compulsive experiences — washing, checking, ordering, hoarding, intrusive thoughts — not just "I have OCD".

• →18 items across six distinct subscales
• →A score of 21 or more suggests clinically significant OCD
• →Shows where it presses most, not just how much

you want an objective marker for how overwhelming the past month felt — not the events themselves, but how you experienced them.

• →Continuous score (0–40) from 10 items
• →Measures the perception of stress, not the life events themselves
• →Good to repeat monthly, as a background marker

you want to put your attention style into words — deep focus on a few things, or attention spread across many — not just the feeling of "losing yourself" in something.

• →Forty-seven items, co-developed with the autistic community
• →Shows transitions, interest depth, and flow states, not just one score
• →Higher score = more monotropic attentional style — a difference, not a flaw

you want to explore avoidant and restrictive eating across three distinct areas — pickiness, low appetite, fear of consequences — especially where it co-occurs with an autistic profile.

• →9 items across three subscales, each with its own cutoff
• →ARFID co-occurs with autism in roughly 20-30% of cases
• →Clinical decisions use the subscale cutoffs, not the total score

you want to reconstruct childhood ADHD traits retrospectively (ages 5-12) — especially useful when an ADHD diagnosis is only being considered in adulthood.

• →25 items about the ages 5 to 12
• →A score of 46 or more is a positive screen for childhood ADHD
• →86% sensitivity, 99% specificity in the original validation

you want a short, positive marker of wellbeing, easy to repeat often, to see the direction over time — not a list of symptoms.

• →5 positively phrased items, percentage score 0-100%
• →Below 50% signals poor wellbeing; below 28% warrants a depression screen
• →A public-domain, WHO-recognised instrument

you want a finer-grained map of alexithymia than TAS-20 — separating difficulty with negative feelings from positive ones, plus externally oriented thinking.

• →24 items across five subscales
• →Separates positive from negative emotions, unlike most other alexithymia scales
• →A difference in emotional awareness, not a character flaw

you wonder whether ADHD-type traits have been with you over the past six months and want a first signal, in two minutes, before an assessment.

• →The six questions of the WHO screener (ASRS v1.1, Part A)
• →Four or more answers above threshold suggest an ADHD assessment
• →A screen, not a diagnosis: it often overlaps with anxiety or sleep loss

sleep has been troubling you for a while and you want to see whether the pattern looks like insomnia, not just a few bad nights.

• →Eight questions about the past month, scored 0 to 32 (higher means better sleep)
• →A score of 16 or less suggests probable insomnia (Espie 2014)
• →A screen, not a diagnosis