Wishing he was dead - fantasy/reality??

Yes I have had suicidal thoughts as a child.

I do remember aged nine on the way to swimming with the Maudsley Hospital.

I was in the Hospital school at the time.

(That was in 1966 nearly fifty years ago.)

I said I want to commit suicide.

A male nurse said if you do not shutup I will commit fanticide.

That remark is called shock therapy so I am not sure if the nurse was right to say that.

I said what does fanticide mean he explained it was a type of murder.

The correct word is infanticide meaning murder of a baby.

Does your son have counselling?

I saw Psychiatrists when I was a small boy but I was not mature enough to make use of their time.  One Psychiatrist complained that I asked him for a game of chess.

There was one good thing about the Maudsley Hospital was that the children had sessions with a Psychiatrist.

I think your son should be treated like an adult and have a chance to discuss his feellings with a Councillor who could be a Psychiatrist or Psychologist or Social Worker Nurse.  I have had lots of Counselling through out my life.

David

Thanks everyone for your posts on this.  We have moved on massively and have a referral with CAMHS currently.

Poor treatment by school, bullying and lack of frienships plus a load of change moving home and school 2 years ago all created that black period.  However, we are out of it for now. 

I am hoping CAMHS will assist us with coping strategies in turning negative thoughts and feelings around to positive where possible and finding alternative options and ways out of situations that are too much for him to prepare him for life.  Hoping I am not expecting too much but I will also do some of this kind of work with him myself.  He is at the perfect age for it before the teens and as we have a history of depression in the family and he easily slips into negative view.

Thanks again, will let you know how it goes!

my 16 yr old son is autistic and recently has been interested in my little pony and loves it but then saw on a forum that its a shame that wishes and dreams dont come true in the real world like they do in the pony world,since then he says whats the point of being here if your wishes and dreams come true and says he doesnt want to be here, he cries himself asleep and even wandered off out of the house on his own because'' his  brain is broken'' which he never does he rarely eats and has even stopped playing his x box!!

he only seems happy when he goes to my little pony meets can anyone help me as i feel so helpless to help him thanks

I concur with the others, try to find out which situations make him say that -- maybe something stresses/annoys/pains him, and he just articulates it in an uncommon way?

If one is in pain, one has two options, remove the pain (the perception) from you, or remove yourself (the perceiver) from the pain.

If he isn't aware that he can remove the pain (pain in the broadest sense of the word!), then he comes to the conclusion that he can only make the pain end by making himself end. Maybe he just means to say "make [that] stop."

If you and he find out what "that" is (it can be several different situations), then you can look out for it. For example, say, he sees a bright light and says, "I want to be dead". Then you say, "If this bright light was dimmed down, would you want to stay alive?" If he agrees, you say "Then I show you how to dim it, and next time, just tell us 'I want to dim this light' and then go dim it, and then you don't have to be dead."

Similarly in the case with the sister, maybe he just wanted her to stop doing something (being too close, interrupting him with objectively harmless things). Then tell him, "If she went out for 15 mins instead of being dead, would that make you feel better?" if yes, teach him a polite phrase to tell her to leave (and tell her to listen!)

PS: And I agree that "I wouldn't care" could be interpreted as "this question is redundant, because after I'm dead, I wouldn't care".

have you asked hm why he would want to kill himself and take itfrom there.

I get this now, with my Mum - I say something like "I don't want this life", "I wish I was dead", or "I just want to go to sleep and never wake up" and she thinks "He wants to kill himself" - and I'm 38! (though only recently diagnosed)

But, generally, I don't - even when I'm very depressed, lonely, and feeling alone - now, I'm not saying this is definately the case with your son, and you are, of course, right to be worried, but, remember we (autists) sometimes have the tendancy to use language in an extremely literal sense and there is a very real literal difference between "I want to be dead" and "I want to kill myself" - for example, when he said "I wouldn't care" maybe he meant "I wouldn't care, because I'd be dead, and you don't feel, or think, anything when you're dead", not "I wouldn't care, even if one could 'care' when one was dead", if you see what I mean.

I understand what you are going through. My 10 yr old has AS and also has mental health problems - depression and v high levels of anxiety. When down he regularly says he  wants to die and he hates living on this earth and he wishes God would kill him. He has never self harmed but he very unhappy in himself and says he has never been happy. Very hard to cope with. If anyone else has went through this any advice is welcomed.

I can relate to this, too.  I have had moments in the past when I would throw violent tantrums, screaming, clawing my face in anger, throwing things, spitting, and saying that I wanted to kill myself. In the heat of the moment I wanted the ground to swallow me up because my whole world felt like it was collapsing. THe tantrums occurred when someone talked during a favourite TV programme or something had happened that I did not like. Of course I would NEVER kill myself or willingly self-harm because I enjoy life on the whole, but when I am having a tantrum all logic goes out of the window because I feel so incredibly unhappy, although I feel fine as soon as the tantrum has passed.

Apparently when I was little I used to say similar things. Try not to look at it entirely from 'I'm gonna kill myself point of view', because to me it was more logical thinking, if something bad happened and I didn't like the way it felt, it would make perfect sense that to stop feeling those things was to not be there. So when you hear what death means (which I interpretted as 'no longer there') you take that word and put into a sentence, 'I wish I was dead' would mean to me 'I wish I don't feel these things'.

My parents used to then freak out and yell at me to get the point across they didn't like it so I stopped saying it when I was about 6. Its only as I've grown older that I've understood all of the problems and darker disturbing things associated with death, like the pain involved, the effect it would have on everyone else etc. But those are all things I learned, they weren't things that came to me naturally. I have never really seen the point of suicide or self harm so I've never gone down that road even though I've attempted to think it through in my head.

"I touched on it with him this evening saying to him, when you say things like "I wish I was dead" some people who do not know you so well will think you mean it and it will worry and upset them.  He said "I do mean it sometimes".  I tried to bring the reality of this saying well you don't mean it as you would never be able to enjoy x,y,z then and he said "I wouldn't care".  But yet, he is very happy in himself?!"

For me I remember bad times more clearly than good times, and it would stand to sense that if given an ultimatum between having really bad times and some good times, or nothing at all, I'd rather go for nothing at all. But as I said, it wasn't until I was older that I fully understood the gravity of what I was saying. But at the time I said things like 'I wish I was dead' it would be isolated to one incident, not a general period of time.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense but its really hard to explain, the simplest I can boil it down to is this.

'It hurts, I don't want to hurt and the solution to remove the hurt would be to remove myself.' That was what I think was my general thought process.

'Violent' video games for me are more of an outlet for my anger or frustration, like World of Warcraft etc. where not only can I hit things, I can be distracted from all my problems in real life.

Hope this isn't as confusing as I think it is.