Medication for 13 year old - your experiences please

Thanks all. The hallucinations have been looked into and they are definitely due to high anxiety rather than anything else thank goodness. As Martin says, anxiety can cause all sorts of symptoms unfortunately. I do agree that meds need to be approached with caution, so I want to go into the appointment on Friday as clued up as possible. My daughter wants to find a way of being able to handle the school environment but that is currently impossible due to her high anxiety. I would like her to be calm enough to be able to try another school, which I believe would handle her needs better, but she is currently too scared to try anything new.

Does her present school have useful accommodations for your daughter's ASC? Very simple things can help a lot, being able to sit wherever she wants in classrooms, being able to sit or stand if necessary. Always having the option of leaving a class if overwhelmed, is also useful and the provision of a quiet place, like a library, as a refuge for whenever she needs it can help greatly. The ability to 'time-out' can stop anxiety from escalating to the point where she is in a meltdown or shut-down situation and has to leave school entirely. Also teachers giving her a sort of weekly lesson plan before hand can help with levels of uncertainty, which exacerbate anxiety.

Thanks Martin. Unfortunately her current school have been pretty useless. It took me over 2 years to get them to agree to not ask her questions in front of the whole class! They have half-heartedly implemented some of the interventions requested on her EHCP but they have made so many mistakes, along with my daughter's friendship group all now turning against her because they think she's just lazy or a drama queen and that's why she has so much time off, so my daughter just hates the whole place now and doesn't feel able to set foot through the door. This is why I want her to change school but she is too scared and thinks all schools will be the same (and I can't guarantee that it will be all sunshine & roses somewhere else). She was so anxious when visiting this other school that she was completely mute and is refusing to spend even a day there (even though she came out & said 'why can't my school do simple things to help, just like this school does'). 

That's so frustrating. Straightforward accommodations are not difficult to create, cost nothing and they can make all the difference. It is difficult to impress on many people that unseen disabilities can have just as much impact on people's lives as the more visually obvious ones.

That's so frustrating. Straightforward accommodations are not difficult to create, cost nothing and they can make all the difference. It is difficult to impress on many people that unseen disabilities can have just as much impact on people's lives as the more visually obvious ones.