Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, I’m a newbie to this forum and I desperately look for help for my 17yo son and my family.
My son has been suffering from OCD for last 3 years. He is most likely to have ASD and was referred for assessment last year but he doesn't agree to have this assessment. He had CBT two years ago and it helped a lot with some aspects of the disease. Last summer we were back to CAMHS as he decided to starve himself and stopped eating. I must say that he is still angry with me for these therapies and consider it to be carried out against his will.
In the current situation of lock down, my son's condition deteriorated a lot. He is disconnected from the world doing rituals all the time until exhaustion like a broken machine. Unfortunately, my husband got involved in the rituals as he wanted to take some stress away from him and help our son but this turned against him. Now my husband has to do all the rituals and my son is absolutely dependant on him. My husband has to put him to bed, take him to toilet, put his shoes, walk him to the park etc and all this takes almost 24 hours as my son doesn't need much sleep. His dinner last for almost 8-10 hours and at best we go to bed 3-4am, at worst 6.30am.
The problem is that my son doesn't agree for therapy and medication. We are in contact with CAMHS but they cant do anything unless he agrees.
We don't have any family life anymore, we are exhausted and tired. We are family in crisis and need help asap to be able to further support our son. We need help with how to manage this situation to improve it and not to make it worse, we need somebody to work with us towards convincing our son to start therapy. We feel abandoned and isolated with our problem. I'm sure there must be some help like family therapy, I just don't know where to turn to find it. CAMHS seems to be useless in a current scenario.
I hope there are people here who maybe have been through something similar and could suggest where to look for help and how to convince our son to go for therapy. Thank you.
Jules and mouse2 thank you both for your replies. I understand that OCD and autism are not diseases but they simply reflect our neurodiversity so please forgive me unfortunate wording in my post. I did not mean to upset anybody. Thank you for your useful comments.
However, the main problem is that we struggle with establishing and involving our son in any kind of daily routine. He is not interested to do anything and he even doesn't want to talk. The only thing we do together, except many rituals my husband is involved in, is a walk in the park in the morning but again he doesn't want to talk and mainly walks with his eyes closed so we have to hold his hand all the time - I guess this also counts as a ritual. We have dedicated last four weeks full time to support our son but we can't break this vicious circle and need more help and advice on what else we could try to introduce some routine.