If you’ve spotted “MIGDAS” in your child’s assessment plan and quietly wondered whether someone made a typo, you’re in good company. Parents search for “Midas autism test” every day, and the mythical king who turned things to gold has nothing to do with it. The real name is a mouthful, the experience is anything but, and for many children this ends up being their favourite part of the entire assessment.
Here’s what the MIGDAS-2 is, how it differs from other tools, what happens in the room, and what comes out the other end. This information is general in nature and is not a substitute for advice from a registered health practitioner who knows your circumstances.
What is the MIGDAS-2?
The Monteiro Interview Guidelines for Diagnosing the Autism Spectrum, Second Edition (MIGDAS-2) is a structured interview and observation process developed by American psychologist Dr Marilyn Monteiro and colleagues, with the second edition published in 2018. It has become increasingly popular in Australian assessment practice, particularly among psychologists, and is often used alongside questionnaires like the SRS-2 or observational tools like the ADOS-2, both covered elsewhere on this site.
The MIGDAS-2 gathers information from three directions: a conversation with you as parents, input from your child’s teacher, and a sensory-based session with your child themselves. There are different protocols depending on age and language, including versions for young children, verbally fluent children and adolescents, and individuals who use little or no spoken language, so the approach flexes to fit the child rather than the other way around.
How is it different from other autism assessments?
In one delightful way: there are no scores. Where most tools convert behaviour into numbers, algorithms and cut-offs, the MIGDAS-2 deliberately works in words. It guides the clinician to build a rich, qualitative description of your child’s individual profile across three areas: language and communication, social relationships and emotional responses, and sensory use and interests.
The sensory emphasis is central, not decorative. Sensory differences are a core part of many autistic children’s daily experience and are recognised in current diagnostic criteria, yet older tools often treated them as an afterthought. The MIGDAS-2 puts them front and centre, using sensory materials and your child’s own interests as the doorway into conversation. The underlying philosophy is strengths-based: rather than cataloguing deficits, it aims to describe how a particular brain is wired, in language many families find respectful and genuinely recognisable. Parents often say the final description was the first document that actually sounded like their child.
What happens during the session?
Your child sits down with a clinician and a collection of appealing sensory materials, things like textured objects, squishy toys, drawing supplies and items chosen with their interests in mind. The clinician follows your child’s lead, chats about the things they love, and weaves in gentle questions about friendships, school, feelings and daily life. For fluent teenagers it looks like a relaxed, meandering conversation with an adult who is unusually interested in their favourite topics. For younger or less verbal children it looks like shared play and exploration.
Nothing is timed, nothing is scored in front of them, and there’s no sequence of tasks to complete. Sessions commonly run around an hour, though clinicians adjust freely. Throughout, the clinician is carefully observing how your child communicates, connects and engages with the sensory world, which is the real work happening beneath the pleasant surface.
Related: Your Child’s Autism Assessment: What Actually Happens, Step by Step
How should we prepare our child?
Barely, and never by coaching. The session works because your child is simply themselves in it, so rehearsing answers or prompting “good behaviour” only clouds the picture.
Two things genuinely help. First, the practical basics: reasonable sleep, food beforehand, and a time of day when your child tends to cope well. Second, and specific to this tool, share your child’s interests with the clinician in advance if asked. Many assessors deliberately stock the room based on what your child loves, whether that’s dinosaurs, Minecraft, trains or slime, so an honest heads-up about current obsessions is a real contribution. Describe the appointment simply: “you’ll hang out with someone who wants to hear about the stuff you’re into, and there’ll be cool things to play with.” That’s both accurate and reassuring. And if the day goes sideways with illness or a rough morning, tell the clinician, because context always matters.
Does the MIGDAS-2 diagnose autism on its own?
No, and the chorus from every article in this series applies here too. No single tool diagnoses autism. The MIGDAS-2 contributes one carefully structured perspective to a comprehensive assessment that also includes a developmental history, standardised questionnaires, information from school, sometimes other observational or cognitive measures, and the clinical judgement of a qualified professional.
It’s also fair to note, in the interests of balance, that because the MIGDAS-2 is qualitative and comparatively newer, its published psychometric research base is smaller than that of long-established instruments like the ADOS-2. Many clinicians see the two as complementary for exactly that reason: one brings standardised scores and decades of validation, the other brings descriptive depth, sensory focus and a format in which children who mask or freeze in formal testing sometimes show themselves more fully. Your assessing clinician chooses tools based on your child’s particular presentation, and it’s always reasonable to ask why a given combination was selected.
What do the results look like?
Instead of a table of numbers, the MIGDAS-2 yields a narrative: an organised, detailed description of your child’s communication style, social and emotional world, and sensory profile, woven from the parent interview, teacher input and the child session. This description feeds directly into the diagnostic reasoning and the final report, and clinicians often lift its language into the recommendations, which is part of why MIGDAS-informed reports tend to read as portraits rather than printouts. Your clinician will talk everything through with you in plain language at feedback.
What happens afterwards?
The findings join the rest of the assessment, and you should receive a written report with practical recommendations for home and school. In Australia, your psychologist, paediatrician, psychiatrist or GP can discuss supports and pathways from there.
A final word
There’s something quietly lovely about a diagnostic tool built on the premise that the fastest way to understand a child is to be genuinely interested in what they love. Your child won’t experience an examination. They’ll experience an adult who stocked a room with their favourite things and then actually listened. Whatever the assessment concludes, that hour tends to produce something rare: a description of your child that sounds like your child. Send them in rested, fed and entirely themselves, and trust that being met with curiosity is exactly what the process intends. They’re going to be just fine in there.
References
- Robertson CE, Baron-Cohen S. Sensory perception in autism. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2017;18(11):671-684.
- Loomes R, Hull L, Mandy WPL. What is the male-to-female ratio in autism spectrum disorder? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 2017;56(6):466-474.
- Lord C, Elsabbagh M, Baird G, Veenstra-Vanderweele J. Autism spectrum disorder. The Lancet. 2018;392(10146):508-520.