Category Archives: Mental Health

Articles relating to mental health are in this category. Typically they will fall into one of two categories. Yours, or your child’s. Yes, your mental health is important.

Basic Service Levels – Universal Application

Our state has something called a “Universal Application.”  This is the application that anyone who requires care in the state system would use to access that care.  We filled one out last year for residential care for David, and another one again this year for his upcoming placement. Now.  That application collects a lot of information. How difficult would it be to include basic information like hospital admission dates in the data that is collected? For that matter, how difficult would it be to make it an electronic form that I could fill out and save on my computer? The reason that I am, for lack of a better word, grumpy about service levels is that the care facility David is going into could have asked me for all of the extra information that they needed a week ago when they called to let me know that he had a

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disappointed in service levels

I sleep during the day, because I stay up all night long with my son. This morning, just as I was getting into a good sleep, I received a call from the facility where David will eventually be a resident.  They need a list of hospital stays for him going back two years. Evidently it is too much work for them to go through his medical records and dig up the information for themselves.  So I told them… “David doesn’t sleep at night.” “As a result, I stay up all night with him.” “You are cutting into my night time right now.” “If you had told me yesterday or even last week that you needed this information, I wouldn’t be upset.” So I sent them an email with the information that they need.  Later in the afternoon I called and asked if the bed was indeed going to be available. 

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stealing from school

Just got a phone call from the school that David goes to.  Evidently he got caught stealing an electronic dictionary from the school.  They are going to give him consequences. Um yeah.  Consequences.  These are the ones that don’t work… apologize. time out. write down what you did and why. no more access to the device. loss of privileges. loss of recess activities. restriction. pat down searches. Very few discipline methods that they could give would be effective. In other news, the teacher informed me that David had been “glorifying” the concept that he could steal anything from anybody and get away with it. So they are giving him a time out and just wanted me to be aware of the situation. “Oh and by the way, did you know that David was evidently taking an mp3 player to school?” they asked. “yeah we know about that.  no, he didn’t

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