Published on 12, July, 2020
Our daughter has been diagnosed with Asperger’s and is currently facing a very difficult time emotionally.
Since September her mood degenerated , she stopped going to school and she was placed under CAMHS and has seen a psychiatrist for which she got medication and therapy plan.
The therapy sessions have been positive but the medication appears to worsen her negative thoughts. They have changed this 3 times now. She is also having very intense outburst of emotions.
At start of this year she was advised to go back to school and this has had a very negative impact.
She doesn’t see a future, she doesn’t feel she can fit in, so these social and academic pressures are aggravating the situation, we been informed that this could be common with young adolescents with Asperger’s.
We are preventing her to be omitted into hospital unit but this appears to be the only option left.
Is there any support body that assists young adults with autism to prevent hospitalisation or to provide advice.
In case hospitalisation is required is there any known clinic that does specialise with children with autism. We were advised that there is no real therapeutic value when young adolescents with autism are hospitalised as the stress levels might intensify or they might pick up negative behaviour from other patients.
Has anyone gone through a similar situation and provide some advice.
Thanks
I've described my experiences before, on this site.
Repeating.
After missing school for month after month after month, through straight refusal to go to school. I was sent, as a nine years old to a special school ( back in 1973).
Although it was a school in name, it was placed physically inside the grounds of a large city hospital. The head was a psychiatrist and half the staff were nurses in uniform. We received no formal teaching or education of any kind.
It was a kind of refuge from the NT outside world. All us kids were emotionally damaged and i suspect half were autistic.
Overall I found it to be a positive experience.
The biggest negative was when I returned to a normal school a year later, I was even further behind everyone academically than before.
Hi Flint, thanks for your feedback. Fully on-board with the fact that treatment should be altered to take into account the autism. Always good to hear from others who went through similar experience. My daughter said before that she feels peer support could help her a lot but there doesn't seem such service out there for adolescents.
Sounds somewhat familiar to my history.
Though I wasn’t diagnosed with autism at the time.
I also was suggested to go into hospitalisation. In the end I did end up in a unit. It pretty much boiled down to, I was really ill, needed serious help, if I didn’t volunteer myself in it was viewed that I would probably end up being sectioned and the fear was that because of my age at the time and when my next birthday was that i’d End up in an adult ward and they saw that as potentially traumatising for someone still considered a teen yet an adult at the same time.
Oddly the time in the unit ended it ended up being one of the best times of my life. At first I hated it, reallly hated it, kept ranting and crying that I wanted to go home because my whole routine had been changed and I couldn’t stand it. A compromise was met where I could go home 1 time a week to keep up at least one of my ‘routines’
given she already has a diagnosis of Asperger they may be willing to compromise from the get go, knowing the diagnosis.
Also because of the diagnosis she will probably be pressured less to look people in the eyes (if that is a problem for her) like I was.
But I have read and found, in my own experience depression seems harder to treat in autism. Or maybe there jus5 isn’t enough knowledge to realise it may need treating a little differently.
My post probaboy isnt that’s helpful. But.... at least consider that volunteering to go to hospital will Be so much less traumatic than being sectioned.