“Diagnosis sometimes helps, but should it be done?”
i take umbrage at that for two reasons. firstly because you obviously don’t understand mental illness, or you do but are being intentionally vague. since asperger’s is in the DSM it technically is a mental illness…but whatever ill move past that.
the bit about you not understanding mental illness is more from your statement that diagnosis sometimes helps. you obviously dont know what the word helps means either. lets start with mental illness. mental illness is either a physical deformity or chemical imbalance in the brain which causes other than normal behaviour. it is called mental ILLNESS because it is an ILLNESS.
now lets swap mental illness with COPD. Does diagnosis help with COPD? Should it be done? youd be cracked if you said no. once you can wrap your mind around the fact that mental illness is just as legitimate an illness as heart disease then you wont be asking such questions. diagnosis itself doesnt help, but once a person is diagnosed then they can get the help they need. but you said that your friend was misdiagnosed and i can understand that it makes you wary of doctors and diagnoses, so lets move on to part two of your question: should it be done?
the answer, of course, is yes. lets go back to COPD. there are false positives for heart and lung diseases all the time, does that mean they shouldnt be done? taking as given that youve accepted that mental illness is a legitimate illness, suppose your friend really had aspergers and therefore couldnt react properly to normal social and interpersonal emotional cues, do you not think that would cause some issues in a marriage? do you not think that would cause issues with kids?
now im not saying that someone with aspergers has to give up a meaningful life with a spouse and children, but it must be treated in order for them to have that. otherwise they’ll never know why they could never have what everyone else wants and has. and i can tell you from personal experience that if someone goes ahead and builds a family despite the fact that they have untreated mental disorders, the consequences can be extremely severe.
so your friend was a false positive, a misdiagnosis and now shadchanim are wary because of the misdiagnosis. i wish your friend only the best in life, and that she should find her zivug and b’ezras hashem build a bayis neeman b’yisrael and that she should have only success and health. but what you have to realize is that its not the mental health system that’s the problem. its a system and systems are imperfect and will generate false positives every now and again, and it IS important for the system to continue so that the other 99.99% can get the diagnosis and treatment they need.
asperger’s by the way would be a legitimate concern to shadchanim so i would understand if a shadchan would be wary of someone who actually had it, but since your friend was misdiagnosed, and mistama the shadchanim know that (maybe get proof from a doctor? i know its a pain but maybe that would help?) then its the shadchanim’s problem, not the mental health system’s.
that being said, perhaps there are other ways she can go about finding a shidduch? is there a family rav who knows her well who would be able to either find her someone or find a shadchan who isnt as narrow minded? maybe a family friend who knows people and does shidduchim as a hobby? idk these are suggestions that are just coming to me, but maybe she can find a shidduch in other ways that the standard open a phone book, dial a shadchan, buy a husband…idk how these things work.
EDIT: obtw just out of curiosity…is the misdiagnosis official? did a doctor officially say that she was misdiagnosed?