Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, she has been progressively worse over last year, sonce diagnosis with going to school/behaviour. She has just started secondary school and did well for a few days but then refusing classes wanting to leave the school dangerous behaviour etc
Been suspended twice this week school saying not her autism as making decisions about behaviour. I dont know enough yet can anyone tell me if this is correct
Around this age we begin to learn about differentiations, social judgement, and compare our selves to others. Everyone wants to fit in, no one wants to be marginalised. But Autistics are different. We use language different and because of this, we mature slower, we don't understand social codes, we end up confused and stressed. And to spend 10 hours knowing internally you cannot connect with or relate with others around you is incredibly isolating. And with each passing year, the gap becomes wider. I was fortunate we kept moving as it didn't give anyone the chance to really take notice of how different I was. But once we stopped, enough time proves who's in and who's disconnected. This would be more than enough to not want to go to school but...
Many of us like our ADHD peers can have hormonal imbalances which can create all kinds of issues. Hormones regulate the body from heart rate to thyroid. And many can have slowly worsening gut-health issues & difficulty with focus which has been more recently attributed to lower GABA for a while, but I've seen much more peer reviewed papers on this since 2020. This can play a role in biological stress-induced anxiety.
And further, with less of an ability to desensitise or filter incoming signals, both external and internal, all the emotions and impact of rejection, the isolation (and it sounds like embarrassment potentially) along with envorinmental stressors like harsh unnatural lighting and poor acoustics, painful frequencies - all of these will be experienced withe a heavier impact, which in turn she'll respond to in proportion to experience.
I don't know much of what is happening, but these are some differences to keep in mind.
Could you go into more detail? My experience of secondary school was inadequate care on the school's part, though that was some 15-20 years ago. I was removed from some classes due to underperforming, but the only class I myself refused to participate in was drama (hardly a loss).
When you say leave the school, do you mean she's leaving the grounds during school hours, or wants to stop attending school altogether? Could you clarify what you mean by dangerous behaviour?