what now?

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

I need help. I have been trying for years to do the right thing with

my HFA son who is now 9. Sometimes I think I did the right things,

sometimes the wrong ones. We got a diagnosis when he was 4, did our

best to get the right schools, got speech and OT services from

schools, did our best to read and think and supplement school

services at home, did music therapy and social skills groups and

speech and everything that was available. We kept getting praise

from everyone for all that we did but we felt like nothing really got

at our son's essential resistance to/disconnection from everything.

Example: he loves music but couldn't do music therapy because it

was " too exciting " and he couldn't attend to the therapist. We had a

daughter 20 months younger who couldn't stay out of hte way and

jumped on and took over all efforts at home play therapy. We got an

ABA counselor to run playdates with him, but it was hard to feel like

there was progress there. We decided the school system was

inadequate and we moved to a different city for a new

experimental " model " asperger program run by people we knew. It was

a complete bomb. We moved him again, this time seeing a good

psychiatrist and getting him on ritalin which helped a lot (this is

one of hte topics I would like to explore with this group), and I

wished I had tried it years before when I'd had a hunch I should,

because it seemed like suddenly he was learning all this stuff he

COULDN'T learn before becuase he COULDN'T pay attention. Socially and

academically both.

This year we felt pretty good -- things were going great in his new,

easygoing, general special ed school, a happy place with many

different special needs mixed together. He was going to the after

care programs and participating (swimming, drama, etc.) He was

expressing interst in having friends.

But in the last few weeks -- actually soon after a shift from Paxil

to Citalopram -- there have been two new scary developments -- the

worsening of an obsession with (it used to be just a wild story

about) an unreal character who is " trying to take over hte world, " an

obsession which led our son to threaten a neighbor if the neighbor

didn't yield information about him. And, maybe related, a really big

regression into complete spaciness and isolation. He says he can't

get thoughts out of his head. He talks to himself almost constantly

for certain stretches of the day. He doesn't want to talk about the

thoughts. They could be about the evil character, or they could be

about prehistoric beasts and mammals and dinosaurs -- his special

interest.

I am desperate, and I feel like I'm going back to the drawing board.

So I need to know if there's anyone out there I can compare notes

with. I'm interested in profound attention problems in otherwise

really smart/curious/academic HFAers, and I'm interested in ritalin

and its ups and downs, and I'm interested in obsessiveness and its

relationship to autism and to ritalin, and I " m interested in what

other antidepressants anyone out there may have combined with ritalin

in a way that alleviates the obsessiveness it may spark.

I'm also interested in WHAT TO DO when you already have bad habits of

action, or rather inaction, at home. What do you do when your son

has a habit of spending way too much time walking around talking to

himself, and it's really just almost impossible to pull him out of

it? I can pull him out -- to do legos or build something or dance

around -- but sometimes I CAN'T.

Sorry this is so long and is such a blurt-ish post. I haven't done

this kind of group in over a year, and I haven't read anything in

over a year (lots of exhaustion and stress from move and new job

etc.), but now I need to get back into it.

Thanks in advance for anyone out there who will respond to any of the

above.