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I presented this issue on some other forums, and have been told twice that my mistake (or rather, my mom's) was mentioning AS as a possible diagnosis.

I was told that I should've made a list of all of my AS symptoms, presented it to the psychologist, tried not to hide any of my AS traits during the sessions, and let the psychologist be the first one to bring up the words "Asperger Syndrome", even if it took a few weeks or months.

One of the posters said that since most general psychologists don't just go looking for AS and have little experience with it, since it was brought up so early in my first session, my doctor probably didn't get a chance to see some of the biggest AS signs, and thus ruled the diagnosis out because of that.

I think they are right.

What do you all think?

It depends on whether a general, non-experienced would decide none of the disorders they have on their mind fit you and would then look them up.

The issue is, not all do that.

A list of AS symptoms can also be easily explained by a leap of other and more common diagnoses. A professional can find it satisfying to have a patient with 5 or more syndromes and disorders if they believe it explains the symptoms.

For some it's also a reality to have, say, social anxiety disorder, depressions, OCD, borderline pd, avoidance pd, PTSD and/or traumatic experiences (is given as an extra diagnosis next to Borderline pd sometimes), ADHD, an eating disorder and... actually, that's the ones that are fairly common and that I can remember at this moment.

The sensible route to take as a general psychologist is to go for common, most likely diagnoses.

Even the general doctor won't look up obscure diagnoses when he's unsure and has to find a reason why a patient is physically sick. The chance to find someone with a rare disease is just too small and not worth the risk to meddle in the unknown.

Anyway, it sometimes turns out to be bad to mention any diagnoses to some professionals. They'll react defensive, even if the diagnosis something common. Patients who 'self-diagnose' are the pet peeve of many professionals, physical as well as psychological.

And some, though open-minded and not bothered by self-diagnoses, react the way you described.

A reconstruction of that professionals reason to deny the possibility of you having AS is guesswork. Maybe that, maybe of one of the reasons I mentioned above, maybe she didn't think it was likely because of another reason.

Better take the 1-hour trip to the specialist if you plan on seeing another shrink in the future because of possible Asperger's.

I have both AS and ADHD and a possible sensory integration disorder(according to my psychologist) and its funny looking at the reports of me in 1991 and how they completely stretched the diagnosis of ADHD to cover everything because AS was not really known until the late 1990s.