Mum needs help

[Wondamum]

Hi All,

I’ve just signed up on here to hopefully get some support and advice.

Firstly I feel so confused.

Here’s my story...

My son is 13, and probably from the age of 5/6 he started to become overwhelmed with things, school situations, friendships. He struggled with right and wrong, always wanting wools to do the right thing and if they didn’t he would become frustrated, he also took/takes the slightest thing to heart, causing him distress. I used to pick him up from school and he would just expolode with all this built up frustration, he would kick the back of the car car and scream and cry, I used to let him get it all out as I felt it better than bottling it up. He struggled through primary school with aniexty and the work, has always been untied and bite his nails and I started to wonder if he had ADHD when he was around 9/10 years old, but the teachers didn’t think so. I worked with him on his self esteem and resilience hoping that would help. He gets obsessed by things if he thinks he needs a blue jumper, he will search and search until he finds it and will go on and on relentlessly. He has huge mood swings he’s the funniest loving little boy and in a flash he’s moody crying angry and depressed. As he’s got older, he’s been on report 5 times at secondary school for low level disputation and forgetting homework. He can be stubborn and argumentative and we struggle to reason with him. He escalate s so quickly, he’s currently sleeping because he’s been so angry today he’s exhausted. I did one of those on line ADHD test and he came out 94%. I just wondered if anyone else thinks I’m right and he does have ADHD and if so, is there any recommendations on how I can help him. Thank you in advance.

[peripatetic]

i can't say that it does or doesn't sound entirely like adhd. i would encourage you to read some of the links in this thread: http://www.addforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=60130 dizfriz was active here for many years and people have often found dizfriz's corner super useful.

best to you. x

[Wondamum]

Thank you.

[Lunacie]

In some ways sounds like adhd, or autism, or anxiety. Or all three of those.

It takes awhile to get an appointment for mental diagnosis in the UK so go
ahead and get started on that. Better to find out and treat it, or rule it out and
figure out what else may be going on.

[kilted_scotsman]

The high levels of frustration you are seeing may have a range of causes. It's worth getting a formal diagnosis, but it's worth remembering that psychological "diagnosis" and "treatment" are not as clear cut as in the medical world.

This throws the solution back onto the family and the school. Yes meds often help, and my view is they can stabilise the situation and provide a valuable breathing space for everyone.... however this comes at a high cost as the child is "labelled" and the school system often uses this as a convenient route to avoiding responsibility for any issues in the learning environment.

Once psychologically labelled, people often assume a child is deficient in a range of areas, not just executive processing which can exacerbate the problem.

One issue can be that instead of being "deficient" the chlld is MORE aware than other children of their age of the differences between what adults say about how the world works and how the child experiences the world working.

This child is adrift in a world where they have no structure to interpret and make meaning of what's happening to them. They are intelligent and empathetic enough to intuit that what they're told and what they see/feel doesn't "compute" but they haven't been given the tools to resolve the issue.

In this situation the child can use hyperfocal behaviours such as researching/searching/desiring as a soothing mechanism, but this can cause problems as the end result when something is either acquired or denied the soothing effect is lost.

Likewise the childs mind is constantly whirling trying to make sense of their colliding emotional and logical worlds so that important things such as homework and routines are forgotten.

There are various ways forward, and it takes time and patience to work out the best supportive framework... the underlying foundation is trying to enter into and empathise with the child's view of the world to ascertain what might be beneficial, and engaging the child in the process so that trust is built. This process is about building the child's emotional intelligence and helping them to avoid executive control settling in the flight/fight/freeze part of the brain and return it to the calm logical decisionmaking part of the brain called the pre-frontal cortex.

This means the parent(s) have to re-enter the world of the child, using their own childhood experiences as a guide. This can be VERY challenging for some parents as it often stirs up similar but suppressed issues similar to those their child is struggling with...... because the ADHD/AS behaviours can have a genetic component.

Because our culture and circumstances usually mean that children have no choice but to attend a particular school/educational system it is very difficult for parents to change the environment their child inhabits for most of the day. Schools are notoriously resistant to change and often deny culpability. This puts the onus on the parent to try to educate their vulnerable and frightened child in how to survive the overwhelming environment they are forced into.

Support in this is not available on the NHS, and is very patchy in the school system. There is a charity called "Place2Be" that does school counselling in Scotland. you could scan around for a helpful private or charity counsellor and/or workshops you could attend to learn the tools professionals use in such circumstances. You would be surprised just how basic these tools are if you can find a counsellor or tutor who is good at passing on this information!

[sarahsweets]

What are his diagnosis'?