Aspergers and/or borderline

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Hi. I am writing here as a mother of an 18 year old daughter. She was diagnosed with aspergers when she was 13, and the diagnosis helped us a lot to make sense of her ways and needs. She has suffered with from comorbidities like social fobia, anxiety and depression, along with OCD tendencies. The comorbidities worsen when she is under pressure.
When she was 13 she was hospitalised for four months, and at that time she started to bring up the subject of borderline. She was sure she had it along with aspergers. The doctors that had examined her thoroughly said no, what you are experiencing is a part of your autism. However my daughter has held on to this conviction and has recently been through checks to see if she has bpd. The result was that she does have bpd, and initially the doctors wanted to toss out her autism diagnosis which both her and I were very much against. So many of her symptoms have nothing to do with bdp, and are typically autistic. In the end the doctors relented.
So now to the situation. I don't want to discount my daughters feelings and conviction that she has bdp. But being a daughter of a mother with full blown bdp I have to say that I don't see those traits in her. And having read much on the subject, it turns out that many girls/women are wrongly diagnosed with bdp when in fact they have some type of autistsm. My daughters main complaint is that she has a lot of mood swings. And that her thinking is often "black and white". She claims to be manipulative, but I have never experienced her being manipulative, at least not out of the ordinary. She thinks her relationships with friends are dramatic, but the way I see it she experiences the ups and downs of friendships that anyone does at her age. In fact she is a very loyal friend, and only breaks off relationships after continued breaches of trust and having her boundaries overstepped.
I am wondering if her bdp diagnosis is the result of her doctors lack of knowledge of how female autism manifests, which is quite different from the male manifestation, and is often misdiagnosed as bdp. Maybe she actually has both, my gut feeling is that she has been wrongly diagnosed with bdp.
I would love any comments about this.
AV

This is more of a generic discussion and not specifically women's discussion so:

It may be that you are her mother and are blind to what she is saying.

However, autism and borderline are VERY 2 different psychological spectrums and are rarely co-morbid. It's like trains and aircraft carriers. The are both vehicles but apart from that very different things.

She is 18, unlikely to be an expert in psychology vs doctors. She may experience herself as manipulative, or believe herself to have a self destructive behavior when it comes to relationships, saying and doing the wrong thing and ruining relationships. I've been there myself, but it was autism doing it.

From what i know, people with BPD are usually flip between having a verbally agressive personality and a child like personality in defensive mode, that is why they are seen as manipulative. BPD patients have more in common with psychopats (Antisocial personality disorder) and narcissist than Autism. It's basically the opposite of Autism. The antisocial spectrum is assertive and seeks dominance, either actively (ASPD/NPD) or passively (BPD), Autism seeks solitude and want's to be part of society, but cannot because of the social handicap. Again, VERY different things. If the doctors put an autism diagnosis on her, they did so for a reason.

That being said, i've read many times on the forums that getting to the right diagnosis can be a lottery, especially if you live in the US countryside with some old general practitioner doing the diagnosis who thinks that he/she knows everything because - age, but really haven't read a single new medical journal for the last 2 decades <que the banjo music>.

Ichinin is right that they are very different things although they may have some common threads. Like the possibility of being passed through genetics but ones environment won't cause Autism like it does with BPD. BPD has been linked to child abuse time and time again, it wouldn't be inaccurate if they were to rename BPD to child abuse disorder. Any one in the mental health field that's worth anything ought to know of this overwhelming connection. This begs the question as to why your daughter thinks she has BPD. Because your mother has it? Does she believe she was abused/neglected?

Autism and BPD aren't usually co-occurring but it's not impossible. However 'black and white thinking', mood swings, being manipulative (if primarily done in avoidance or response to stressers), and her feeling her friendships are dramatic can be explained by Autism alone.

I can't say she it's one way or the other, but I tend believe in gut instincts