Affirming Report Language – Part 1

Last year, I was working with a young adult who we discovered is autistic. 

After years of struggle and feeling misunderstood, he shared that the final report felt like a true and hopeful record of how he processes the world.

Later, he shared that his sister was also evaluated, but her experience was dramatically different. 

“I read her report and it’s devastating,” he said. “It’s like a list of everything that’s wrong with her.”

He explained that his sister felt she had had a good evaluation, but the report felt like a laundry list of deficits.  

She was overwhelmed by seeing everything that she struggled with and didn’t know what to do next.

Affirming Reports in a Deficit-Based System

Writing a report that empowers our clients can be tricky.  There are many obstacles in our way, including…

• Deficit-focused evaluation tools

• Deficit-based criteria for diagnoses and services

• Being taught to write for other clinicians

• Traditions in our field, like focusing on scores

• Lack of affirming models and examples

But writing an affirming report in a deficit-based system is not only possible but critical if we want our clients to leave our office feeling empowered by the information they receive. 

In a nutshell,

Neurodiversity-affirming report writing means writing for our clients, not just other practitioners.

This means writing in a way that reflects our clients’ lived experience – both the strengths and the challenges – in a way that is true, respectful, and easy to understand.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sending out a few ideas for how to shift the language in your reports to make them more affirming, easier to read, and more understandable to clients.

Here’s Tip #1.

Tip #1: Affirming Language

The first step to writing a more empowering and effective report is to think about the specific words we use.

As my young adult client reported:

“I have a lifetime of people telling me everything I did wrong. If the report was a document of my deficits, I wouldn’t have been able to process it.”

To start changing the language in your reports, consider the following reframes:

These reframes do not deny that the individual is coming up against significant challenges.  But rather, they describe those challenges as a lagging skill or an environmental barrier, instead of something that is “wrong” or “deficient” within the person.

For example, imagine a client, Janey, reading the following statement about her testing results:

Janey has abnormal social reciprocity, tending to monologue about her own circumscribed interests.

After reading this statement, we run the risk of Janey (or her parents) walking away thinking she is “abnormal” and feeling ashamed of her deficits.

Instead, we can better describe her experience of interacting with the world as:

Janey shows differences in her social interactions. She is very passionate about her interests and may talk about them at length. This can make back-and-forth conversation more challenging.

These words are more positive, descriptive, and easy to understand for Janey and her family.  

While this description does not deny that Janey is having challenges, it does so in a way that Janey is likely to connect with, without the shame of being “deficient.”

Of course, writing an affirming report is about more than “find and replace.” For more tips on impactful report writing, join us at…

How to Write Affirming, Understandable, Efficient Reports

While word choice is important, writing truly empowering reports is about more than just replacing one word with another.  

If you want to learn more about writing reports that empower our clients and their families, check out the on-demand webinar below to learn practical strategies for making your reports more affirming, easy to read, and easy to write.

After this workshop, you’ll walk away with:

• Specific language for writing affirming reports

• Strategies for more effective communication

• Templates for easy-to-read documents

• Tech and analogue strategies for making your report writing more efficient

I hope to see you there!