We have been struggling for two weeks with behaviors at home. David is having major issues with listening, with taking his meds as directed, with a lot of things. To the point where we hospitalized him.
At this point, David is content to force himself to vomit his meds up every morning. This throws his whole day off. Why?
He is on meds for ADHD, and mood stability. At night he is on meds to help him sleep. Without these meds, he is beyond uncontrollable.
Our argument has always been that he needs the structure of school to be able to exist.
On August 7th, we are meeting with our mediator and the school. There will be over 10 people at this meeting for our son.
Things are escalating at home, and we aren’t entirely positive that he doesn’t need to live in a facility for care. He needs more structure than we can give him. Try as I might, I can’t run my household like a prison. We are a family of 7 with three dogs and a cat. Life just doesn’t work that way.
In May his respite family quit in part because, they said, he was harming their dogs. We are starting to see evidence of that behavior here at home. So what are the options? Long term psychiatric care? We are already doing that. The only thing left is to put him in a residential facility for long term and see how he does. Last year he was in a facility for 7 months, and did very well there.
To be frank, and I know that our school is reading this… we need help with him. We have submitted the application to have him placed in a residential facility. Wish him luck.
Thankfully, his mentor support has stepped up to the plate and increased their availability. We went from two days a month to three days a week here. Next week, he gets at least one day, and more are available if we need them.
I don’t know what the magic answer is here. I do know that we aren’t giving up on David. We are simply moving to the next level of his care.
When you have a child with mental illness in your family, there are no easy answers. If someone thinks that they have all of the answers, I welcome them to contact me through this website and let me know what they are. I guarantee that we have tried 99 percent of them.
Once things shake out a bit and we know if he was accepted into the facility, I will post about some of the things that David has done this summer. It has been an interesting summer.
David is bipolar and has ADHD, Facets of Autism, FAS, RAD, and conduct disorder. He also has OCD, and oppositional defiant disorder.
We put him in the hospital long enough for him to get stabilized on his meds. At which point the hospital can’t keep him because he isn’t “exhibiting behaviors.”
He does have over night respite care, but I just don’t feel right about subjecting a person to David’s needs on an overnight basis. It is hard enough to do it here at home. For someone who isn’t use to his quirks, needs and idiosyncrasies, it would be next to impossible.
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Hi Carl,
I can imagine your frustration. Have you tried movement based options, both music and movement are excellent options. I find they especially work well with boys. I don’t know how old your son is but I have been teaching dance to both boys and girls in schools since 1993. Some other options are Anat Baniel of the Anat Baniel Method at http://www.anatbanielmethod.com/ and Bryan Post of the Post Institute at http://www.postinstitute.com. Lastly Jacqueline Green has a telesummit called the Great Parenting Show.
Lastly I am sure this is causing a great amount of stress for you. What are you doing to alleviate the stress you are probably experiencing. EFT( Emotional Freedom Technique), The Healing Codes as well as deep breathing and exercise are great stress reducers as well as Qi Gong and TAi Chi .