Bear in mind that the disorder did not appear in the DSM until very recently. And depending on which type of degree you have, getting training in DSM may be 100% optional.

Alas, the medical-model environment we live in today turns a lot of therapists away from wanting to diagnose anyone. Social workers, who do 80% of the headshrinking in this country, are encouraged to avoid diagnosing people. And the reasons for that are actually very good. Too often, a DSM diagnosis causes the medical profession to descend on you and announce that you are going to be all effed up and have to take psych meds for life, as if Concerta and Depakote were insulin. Many doctors and patients truly believe nothing else but meds will help you, which is BS of the purest ray serene.

A firm diagnosis SHOULD help you understand what you're dealing with and take charge of the problem. Too often it causes people to throw their hands up and use the diagnosis as an excuse for never handling anything again.

I think its probably best to treat the patient's problems by giving them helpful advice, but many experts are trained or indoctrinated to give no advice.

I think most effort should go to helping the patient with not much time spent on diagnosis, I agree theres too much overmedication

Asperger's is a developmental disability, not a mental illness, and for that reason the treatment is NOT counseling; it's all about skills training. Whenh I think of how much easier my life could have been if someone had actually told me how to handle things!

I was never given any advice by the many mental health professionals I saw over many years, they never told me what I was doing wrong, I wonder if they didnt want me to get better

It's only recently that shrinks were allowed to start giving advice. One of my headshrinking professors told me that based on one comment he made as an intern to a client in a single session, suggesting that she might want to consider divorce as an option, he was forcibly switched over from clinical work to macro. "If you want to tell people what to do, you should be in administration, not counseling." That's the general thinking in a lot of areas. They are slowly switching over to more of a skills-training model, but it's not fast enough to help all the thousands of people who have already given up on themselves.