PIP and Autism guides?

Tracy wrote: Hi could anyone point me in the right direction if there are any guides on autism and social anxiety. Trying to fill my daughters form in and really panicking about what to say. A local carers trust helped me to fill in form, but have hardly written anything, she said the evidence was enough.
Any help gratefully received.

I'm afraid we don't provide condition centric guides, PIP awards are not based on the claimants conditions but rather the limitations that result from them in regard to a range of daily activities.

Have a look at our PIP Claim guide for the criteria that someone claiming PIP would need to meet.

www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/help-for-claimants/pip

If you have further questions then reply to this post and we will do our best to help.

Gordon

Tracy

It's not going to be enough for you to just say anxiety I would recommend that you use the following template to answer each question.

1. What is the health condition and what are the symptoms that cause you problems with the activity.
2. Describe the problems you have, giving details and examples if you can.
3. If you use any aids or appliances, list them and explain why you use them.
4. If you need physical help, supervision or prompting, whether you actually get it or not, explain what you need and why you need it, including if you need help when using aids or appliances. If you can’t manage even with help from another person and have to have everything done for you, say so.
5. Say when during the day or night you have problems. For example, is it all the time, mostly in the morning or just in the evening?
6. If your condition varies, from day to day or week to week, try to explain how much it varies and what problems you have when you are at your best, worst and average.

Remember the activities need to be completed "reliably" and "on the majority of days", these terms are explained in our PIP Claim guide.


Make sure that you properly understand the criteria for the activities that you expect her to score for, please do not attempt to re-interpret the wording, you need to bring her problems to the Descriptors, not the Descriptors to her problems.

The Going Out activity looks at three things.

Planning a route - this is primarily a cognitive or sensory (e.g. blindness) activity. You are being asked about the problems you would have with working out how to get from one place to another, you do not need to be able to follow the route that you are planning.

Undertaking a Journey - this is do with mental health issues such as agoraphobia and social anxiety and is concerned with you leaving the house to go somewhere, they will be interested in the things that stop you doing this. You need to show that you would suffer "overwhelming psychological distress" to meet the criteria.

Following a route - This activity about the problems you would have navigating a route. So are there problems cognitive, sensory or mental health issues that would prevent you from doing this? This is different from undertaking a journey, in fact if you cannot undertake a journey then you will not score points for following one and vice versa.

Gordon