Has anybody ever been NOT 'diagnosed'?

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I don't have a problem understanding big words, it is not a problem of vocabulary, but the vague concepts that are not linked to concrete things or actions in the real world of problems in daily life for autistic adults or problems that autistic children have growing up.

It seems like some autistic people think much more in vague concepts and group ideologies with verbal labels, and other autistic people think much more in concrete things that because they are concrete they don't labels or containers.

So far, in autism advocacy, it's the first group who have dominated, and I think that it is time for the second group to contribute more practical things, but the second group is often not as high functioning as the first group in social/emotional/language areas, and their plain words don't sound so good, and they don't know how to communicate in a way that gives people warm fuzzies, so they need to be actively included and promoted by the first group free from group ideologies and terminologies, so they can do things that will benefit autistic people in long-term.

Usually, people like me who are good at doing practical things can't find an organization to do them in or specific people to do them with, because the autistic people who care about helping other autistic people are too focused on those group ideologies and spend much of their time arguing with neurotypical people like parents of autistic children, when in fact it is good for autistic people and neurotypical people to work together on practical projects.

Then, there are those autism speaks protests, which I find it hard to see how they are effective at anything, with a few people waving signs near a big fundraiser for a big organization. The way to go against them is not to hold these puny protests, but to come up with another way to build something big, like practical educational systems to help for autistic children growing up, and when people see results from that, their ideas may change. There is no competition in this area, it is a vacuum to be filled, and I have heard the heads of special education in local school districts say that they really need help in this area as more and more diagnosed children are going through the school system and they don't know what to do other than putting them into special education classrooms where they learn almost nothing and of course their later outcome reflects their education.

Me.

tl;dr: I have judged not to have AS at 16 without a gold standard assessment. I had very severe mental health difficulties which may have masked autism. When my mental health problems including anxiety improved, my autism-like difficulties remained. I was offered a second opinion, to help decide how best to treat my interpersonal difficulties. I am waiting for my pre-diagnostic assessment interview.

I was assessed at 16 and came up as non-autistic. I put it out of my head for years, with only occasional twinges of doubt. Indeed, when people asked me if I had Aspergers I insisted that I did not. My doctor added to my notes that I had 'social maladjustment and my psychologist said I had many of the traits but these were better explained by an abusive childhood and anxiety.

Fast-forward to age 19, when I had reached the end of a lengthy waiting list for a place that provided long-term group treatment for emotional problems, it turned out that 97% of people there had personality disorders and that (especially BPD) is what they treated. I insisted that I didn't think I did have one, but if I did it would be Avoidant, Schizoid or OCPD. I was at first dismissed by my psychiatrist - lots of people don't think they have PDs when they do and they treat people without them anyway.

Psychologist there was very understanding and asked me if I thought I had traits similar to the autistic children I volunteer with. I said it was agreed that I had traits. She offered a 2nd opinion referral. I said I'd like one. It got forgotten about with other problems and in the meantime I had a think about how I'd never actually done a gold standard test, that my sensory difficulties had not yet been explained and that most of our conversations in CAMHS were about my very severe mental health problems.

I'd assumed that my social skills and difficulties would significantly improve when I was no longer anxious and no longer so deeply affected by mental health issues. To some extend, they have but mostly around my anxiety and extreme rigidity. Now I'm less rigid than before, but still get upset with changes and still have noticeable social deficits.

So now, I'm going to be assessed at a time when most of my difficulties are ones that relate to AS/autism, with the knowledge that I definitely don't have a PD. If I think the assessment is fair (for example, the psychiatrist I saw forced me into a group programme knowing that my hearing was too poor to participate and made me false promises about adjustments - this was unfair) or at least that it is not obviously bogus, I will accept that I have symptoms similar to autism but that these are situational.

My wife's view is that it doesn't matter either way and that I have become non-NT if I wasn't already autistic. So that I ought to accept my difficulties as probably here to stay.

Never seen the inside of a psychiatrist's office myself, so can't speak directly to the OP. But I'd just point out that there are tons of threads on WP and elsewhere about people being repeatedly misdiagnosed with one "disorder" or another before finally (after what sounds like an absolutely agonizing and interminable series of psychiatric visits and treatments) ending up a solid diagnosis of autism/AS/ASD.

As far as one can judge from forum posts, this seems to be an extremely pervasive experience among those who entered the mental health system in childhood or adolescence.

So if for some reason I were to go to a psychiatrist and they told me I didn't have ASD, my first reaction would be that I needed to find a better psychiatrist. Even a second opinion to the same effect, which seems highly unlikely, would leave me pretty skeptical -- unless they had some really convincing alternative diagnosis (which I can't imagine what it would be).

I'm always willing to reconsider my view of things. But at this point in life, after 36 years of struggling to conform, I'd say I know the inside of my own brain better than any "expert" is likely to. It would take an awful lot to make me reconsider that.