Asperger?

Well, i have been diagnosed by an "aspergers" expert. He says that I have Aspergers but i dont quite believe him. After doing lots of research and thinking back to my childhood and adolesence, only about 60% of the symptoms fit. And those that fit can easily be the cause of other things.

For example, my lack of social abilities can be caused by the following.

I was born in germany and came to South Africa when I was 11 months old. I lived on a secluded farm until I was 12 years old. It was only me, my parents and farm workers on the farm. There where no kids my age that lived close by. The school I attended was about 3 kilometers away in a town that was very small. It only has one post office, one petrol station etc. Population: 2000 whites and about 10 000 brown/blacks.

In my class at school, there where about 10 whites and 20 brown or blacks. I am no racist but since we where german, our cultures where different so i didnt have much in common with them.

So basically, 12 years in isolation apart from school every day.

Also, since i was german, i wasnt fluent in afrikaans and english, and always had a obvious german accent.

That would explain lack of social skills, language problems and lack of friends and the feeling of not fitting in with the others. Also lack of relationships with girls since there were only about 5 white girls in the whole town. Again, no racism.

I also didnt really have a learning problem. I was always top of the class until high school but then i just didnt want to study or do homework anymore.

There were also no real problems "reading" people. I was always and am still very good at reading body language and knowing what the person means.

I also never had any "special interests" that were obsessions. I had some hobbies and pursued them with passion but nothing out of the ordinary. I also never had the urge to tell people or my parents about my hobbies and never led monologues about them without giving the other person a break to speak.

Those are the reasons why I dont believe i have aspergers, but maybe. very mild form of it.

I am leaning to Conflicted Avoidant Personality Disorder but 2 psychiatrists i have seen in the last month said no to that and went to Aspergers.

So, now my question to you is, does that sound like aspergers to you?

do as many tests as you can. look at the trend. then decide. your psychiatrists opinion and your opinion are only 2 opinions. you can do far more tests and they will each have been constructed far more rigerously. candidly, i think you're viewing things in a somewhat less than objective light. there are many degrees of autism. you might be PDD-NOS, for example. but you seem to want something more suited to your own perception. that mightn't be the case. ultimately, you have to put your trust in something. only you can decide what that something will be.

Also...these people aren't perfect. They may see something and hook onto that, or not see something and don't hook onto that..if that makes any sense at all.

For example, a lot of what you're talking about seems like less of a problem than I have at similar stuff (e.g. I had plenty of opportunity for social interaction, but didn't really do much of it. Was bullied, moved around a lot, etc). I was officially diagnosed with PDD-NOS, and not Aspergers itself. I think that he was "wrong", but both his supervisor thought I was more on the AS side, and apparently this guy didn't "went with" PDD-NOS instead. You could, very well, be on the PDD-NOS side of things, but I'm not really sure.

*shrug* as shock said, too...you gotta put your trust into something, but it's your choice what you're comfortable doing that with. you should also ask, does it really matter one way or the other?