One of the greatest days of my life was when I realized that nothing that happened to me in High School had any real significance whatsoever. If I ever have a child I will home school and they will never set foot in the insane prison we call 'school' in this country.
I went to my 20 year reunion. The popular people tried to reestablish an hierarchy and I lost interest. It was nice to see some old friends, but it was my last reunion. Social media makes them kind of pointless.
High school feels more important when you’re there, thank goodness the real world isn’t like high school. Or is it?
I liked one or two teachers but if I never see any of my 'fellow' students again it will be too soon. Why do schools allow bullying and harassment as if it's part of the curriculum? If anyone in the real world ever treated me like I was treated in HS I would have them arrested, but I have never had to. Most people are actually nice but schools train them to be *******s. Why do we send our kids to prison?
Not. One. Bit. The real world has police and courts and lawyers. Most importantly, they have LAWS and enforce them. Once you enter a HS you are in a cloud cuckoo fantasy land, with no more rights than any prisoner in a penitentiary.
Im asocial and emotionally invulnerable. Neither of those are considered 'illness' last time I perused the DSM5, but neither are they considered healthy or 'normal.' I chose maybe.
I have Autism -- I am not ashamed of my condition. Very many people have Neurosis. Autism is a type of Neurosis.
It hasn't been diagnosed but we are almost certain my youngest grandson has Aspergers...and that is only in the last few weeks after I started reading about it after the police killed an Aspergers boy. We are not getting him diagnosed yet. We're waiting to try and work out whether that would be best for him. He is doing fine at school though he does have issues with communication/friendship. My daughter was saying she had given some advice on what to do and he was following it and finding things a bit easier. It is interesting how many aspects of it you kind of get used to as 'just him'. I watched a video by an adult with it about Aspergers in children. He did an impression of eyes not looking at the person. It was my grandson. I asked my daugher whether she thought he looked her in the eye. She said 'yes'. I showed her the video and she soon recognised her boy. Another one in that video that we recognised was him walking on tippy toes. He manages most things. As of yet he has done no meltdowns at school. Nothing my daughter tried for them worked and if she got angry he just got worse. He did not care about any threats. We thought he must have some kind of trauma going on and she worked with him going by some of the new psychological techniques. This has now got her so that she can usually calm him very quick and he has had very few meltdowns recently. She was suspicious that he might be on the spectrum before so had looked it up. I totally love this wee boy. Our current interest is just how we can best help him and at the moment that seems to be getting as much information as possible.
Our son is Aspie. He's 22. He's very good at the socialization. He's passionate about politics and reading. Everything with him, though, is extreme. Everything. He starts drinking beer, he's at eight/day within a month. He starts smoking pot, he's at an ounce/month within a month. He started at the far upper-left quadrant on the political compass. Within a year, he was at the far upper-right quadrant. Now, he's at the far lower-right quadrant. All since he was 17. Everything is so extreme. My husband thinks it's because he wants to be where nobody else is, so that he can be the authority in that area. Does that make sense to you? He sucks at math & science. He's still in HS. If you ask him why we need math, he wouldn't know how to answer. As to me; I'm bipolar. We make a great pair, especially when we are both having meltdowns.
A diagnosis early on is key. For our son, he qualified for ESE, and was given a grant from a private fund to help pay for that. It's unlikely he will ever qualify to work, though we hope so. We're going through paperwork with SSA, now, to get him some sort of benefit until he can work.
Well this wee boy is eight so he has managed to survive till now. That said there was a lot about how he acted that we did not understand. I think I am feeling very positive about knowing what is going on with him as we can work with some knowledge we know what we are dealing with. I think my daughter has more concern about getting him tested than me. She is hoping he has it quite mild and will manage. I have a feeling he would do much better if he knew. He has a brother and sister and they all love each other and are very loyal to each other but they cannot understand some of his outbursts. I think if they knew they would accept him more understanding he was not just being a pain in the ass. Academically he is doing fine so we do not expect to have any problems with that at school. He has though got very upset when he has had to do things like say a poem at school or give a one minute talk. His teachers have seemed to just feel for him because he is nervous. Thankfully up till now he has had teachers who he loves and who he believes love him and I think that has helped a lot. I think my daughter is worried he will be encouraged to act it out more if he knows it is something 'special' about him. When I told her that I had found out that they often like talking to each other and feel so good speaking to people who understand how things are for them she said - 'well that is just what I am concerned about. He might then start doing it more'...so maybe to some extent she is just working through accepting things. With boys with Aspergers I have heard that they often get through primary school reasonably well but start having problems once they get to Secondary school - High School in the US. My own thinking is that it would be better to address it when he is not having too many problems and in that way he will be stronger to deal with things when they are more difficult. I suspect we will look for a diagnosis in the near future. I am thinking of getting him a book on it and just give it to him saying I thought he might be interested. Some kids are a bit different. There probably are about 5 in your school. In reviews teachers said it was well received in class and one said one boy immidiately said 'that's me!' As I said it is only very recently that I read about it and could recognise him in it and since then we seem to recognise more each day. I think we will just gradually get used to it and see what helps him most and given that he seems to be definately Aspergers I think we will be getting it diagnosed before he starts having problems at school which he might. I am sorry to hear of your son. He sounds like he has things more severe than my Grandson who I do expect to be able to make a living. Things are at the moment though going well with him. Had I found out when he was going through a more difficult spell I might have thought differently. I really hope you manage to get things sorted out re benefits he may need. Re what your son is up to. I don't know enough yet to have a guess. I have heard in the UK that if they need it they can get a worker who is there to support them, help them understand and accept themselves and deal with issues. This can go right on with the same person sometimes until they are an adult. Possibly that sort of thing might help him if you have similar in the US.
Interesting. It does sound a more mild case. Our son was diagnosed at 2. He went through a battery of tests over the course of two weeks. One thing has been true for him; the older he gets, the worse it gets. We're trying to find help, but we're having a very hard time.
LOL 'Tis true that I can obsess over these things. It is part of my condition. I'll never stop be fascinated by party mentality. I don't understand it. I don't agree with anybody 100%. How people can support a single party platform, 100%, is just so dang confusing and counter-intuitive to me. My husband, friends, family - they get sick of it, so here I am.
Prolly doesnt qualify as mentally ill- but I have an auditory processing impairment. I can hear fine, but I cant translate sounds into words very quickly. If theres background noise or someone tries to speak without first getting my attention, I will have to ask them to repeat themselves while I concentrate on them. If they say more than one 'thought', I have to ask them to wait while I process it or I'll lose it trying to hear the next one. So I dont converse much in person.
It's important to point out there are certain conditions that do not conveniently clearly fall into the either/or category. And not all forms of these conditions would have an effect on political thinking. As just one example, Parkinson's is typically not thought of as a "mental illness", since it typically most only affects the brain's ability to coordinate physical bodily movement. Or something like ALS, especially in the milder stages. These people are not "crazy" and are still perfectly fit to make rational decisions and vote. Something like Asperger's or mild autism might straddle the borderline, but are still not exactly the type of thing that comes to most people's minds when it comes to the concept of "mental illness". Some of these people might even be more fit to make political decisions than normal people. And depression is a condition that is surprisingly common in the population, especially during the pandemic shutdown, and especially in northern parts of the country during the winter.
My nephew has this- diagnosed in primary school. Had physiotherapist input which made a huge difference in his school work.
Thats when I was diagnosed as well. Im not sure what led to it, but I'm damn glad they decided to do an auditory cognition test before they just put me on ridilin. Apparently most people can still understand what the teacher is saying while a dog is barking outside or someone is whispering incoherently... who knew? They put me in special ed for a little while before it became apparent I wasn't quite special enough and returned me to regular ed and told me to just try harder... it worked out.
It is interesting that my daughter for a very long time believed that he was educationally sub normal. He was very young when she told me that she hoped he might get into mainstream school but she thought he would be remedial. I can see looking back just how concerned she was. He didn't start holding things until well after the age he should and even though he was able to turn over as he did this in his cot, he was unaware he could when awake till months after he should have been doing it. For whatever reason one day when he was very young, maybe five or six months, when they were all here and having a meal I noticed him looking at me for a long time. There was something in the look that made me think he was definately intelligent. I just refused to believe he was in any way educationally sub normal. I told myself it was because she was looking after 3 under fives and not only that but because this one was not planned, 2 little ones with only 18 months difference. I did day care from 6 months when my daughter was working and I determined that I was going to give him as much attention as possible. I don't think he started having meltdowns until he was maybe two or three and with me did not have them very often - usually when there was something stressful going on. He did though have a time when he would go crazy if he made a mistake when he was doing his homework - like learning spelling. If he did not know it before he had learnt it he would go crazy, get ott angry and blame me. Again I assumed someone had had a go at him and so I just accepted it and him and tried to gently explain that there is absolutely nothing wrong in making mistakes when he was doing homework as the whole point was to learn things he did not know already. It was the same with reading. Get one word wrong and he would go ballistic - and blame me. I can remember the first day he made a mistake and just quietly accepted the right answer. I told him how proud I was of him for being able to do that. I have now learnt that a lot of kids with Aspergers are perfectionists and do exactly this is they make a mistake. I also got interested in the work of Canadian developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld and in people who worked with him like Gabe Matte and the woman who developed 'the calm technique' for children and introduced my daughter to these as well. I was thinking all the time that his problems came from some psychological place and he seemed to fit into what they were talking about. Though I now am almost certain this was not true, working as if it was, treating him with care and concern rather than trying to get him to behave as you would expect any 'normal' child to definately brought results. We were it seems wrongly blaming something else for what was going on. It was only when I started reading about Aspergers that I kept seeing him again and again and asked my daughter if she had ever considered that was the problem to which she replied 'yes' and we got talking. My daughter and his dad split when he was three and Dad demanded as is his right in modern times to have all the children half the time. He has recently told my daughter he is having difficulty being able to deal with this boy. He still has a lot of meltdowns with him. I suspect that my always believing that he was suffering from some trauma and working to get him through it has helped. Interestingly he developed empathy when he was younger than expected. His negative Aspergers symptoms seem to be triggered by stress - which can be very minor stress. My daughter maintained the belief that he had learning difficulties to some extent up till this day although that very much dwindled. I can remember one of the times when I asked her if she now believed he was alright she told me there still were still things which concerned her. She mentioned him not knowing what a worktop was when he was three. My response was that somehow no one had mentioned it to him. Even now he does things like get two words mixed up regularly - for instance 'was and now' and 'tell and ask' which she believes are signs of Aspergers. He was the one child that I felt tempted to smack particularly when we were out walking and he would get into one of his meltdowns which of course I simply thought were extreme trantrums. It was impossible even to do the usual with a kid and leave him if he was too difficult. He simply would not come no matter how far away you went. Thankfully I never did smack him. On Friendship. My daughter was telling me yesterday he has a new friend. He has always liked having girls as close friends and he apparently has a new one....wait for it. She is two years older than him and has apparently already decided she is gay. They are texting each other all the time. My daughter is unsure that she is the right person for him..but it is interesting him and her texting all the time as his texts are usually so strange that other kids get fed up with them after a short while, while he continues to send them, Part of me is wondering if she might be one of the other kids in school with Aspergers. and this of course is one of the reasons for considering a diagnosis. I was listening to someone talk about certainly in the UK they do not diagnose someone with Aspergers unless it is causing difficulties in their life - I imagine not to pathologise unless necessary. He did not agree with this at all, pointing out that even if someone was unusually fortunate to have parents who got him through childhood more or less alright, the time would come when he would have to face the world alone and that would be hard...because it is not something you get over. I also am concerned hearing that with boys it is usually in secondary school that problems start to multiply (with girls this apparently happens in primary school). I don't understand why if your son was diagnosed at two you have not had more support. Certainly here in the UK it seems there is a lot and I cannot imagine what it is like if you have had to look after him without that support. Finding out about that sort of thing now rather than 17 years ago is I think a lot easier due to the internet. I trust you have tried that. I really hope you can find the support you need. It must be a nightmare wanting to help if you are unsure what to do. There really is lots of support to be found online. If he isn't already doing it there are places where he can find and meet/speak to people who also have it. As I said in my last post many people with Aspergers particuarly adults find that an enormous help because at last they are with people on the same wavelength who understand how things are for them because it is the same with them. They feel less alone. I know also that if needed in the UK they can have someone outside the family helping them to look for appropriate work, looking after themselves and so on. I am sure if you felt there was someone else in there working with you, that alone would make things easier for you.
PTSD, severe anxiety disorder and depression. Well controlled during the day, but the nights are a bitch.
I think you will find that has changed now. Certainly in the UK with the net making the possibility stronger and some teenagers having committed suicide. My grandaughter has just started secondary school. They are given a special teacher who they meet with once a week as a class to talk about social issues but s/he is there for them any time they experience any kind of bullying. They also now have a counselling service where they offer all of the children free counselling should they want/need it and also offer that to parents.
I'm on the other side and use the ACT model with clients. Although I'm working as an apiarist at the moment This is pretty spiffy as well Tm.org
