to feel so overwhelmed with ASD teenage daughter?

At that age the child would need to be involved in the referral and agree to it.

Exactly. I have both personal experience as a mum and professional experience as a teacher in autism provision.
If you take that approach they will become more and more distressed at the prospect of going. Soon they will be distressed that it's nearly time to go, then that it is the day that they go.

It's really a bit arrogant to post such a sweeping statement when you (clearly) have no experience of having to negotiate getting an autistic teen to do something they feel uncomfortable doing.

They can make her attend appts etc, but not engage with a therapist. If forced she is hardly likely to be open and as needed for it to be of any use.

High school is overwhelming for an autistic person, listen to what's she said "if everyone did what she needed she would be fine" that means that she is struggling with something at school and it sounds like no one is listening to what could help her, maybe it's the noisy crowded classes, maybe it's the disruption of having to have a different teacher for every lesson, has she told you what she feels may help her while at school? Like a quiet room she can go to when feeling overwhelmed that she can do her schoolwork in, or she can be let out of class early to avoid the crowded hallways (that's what my daughter does), adjustments like that can make a difference in my experience, my daughter has to leave classes 5 minutes before everyone else so she doesn't have to deal with the loud hallways between classes, she is also permitted to take her work and go to a specific room if she is overwhelmed without needing to ask

I don’t think you understand - you literally cannot force someone to engage with something if they aren’t willing or able to. Rather than forcing one sort of therapy you need to look at alternative options.

We ended up home educating and paid for 1-1 art therapy.

I feel your pain, 4 years later and we're now only seeing an improvement. The only thing that worked for us, was taking her out of school and being placed in an ETA setting. It changed all our lives. Anxiety and OCD still bad but she is now cooperating with CAMHS.
I wish you luck. It's bloody hard.

@StressedSuzie I feel your pain. Got DS 15 asd at home. It's a nightmare with all his ocd and weird demands. He is NOT being entitled but his demands come out of a place of fear. Ex. He will ask us to not move certain objects or not talk close to him. It's exhausting. He refuses therapy and tbh all therapists he has seen so far when he was younger didn't help him at all. He's on Sertraline 100 mg which was really effective in the beginning (10 y old old) for his ocd but doesn't help much now I think. Well, ofcourse they help but not as much. It's really tough OP and not many people can understand what life looks like for the DC concerned and their families.💗

God help the poor ND kids you deal with !

you sound like you have zero empathy with parenting an Asc child

mine are school avoiders since year 6
you can’t just force ND kids to do things - I wish !

I’d put therapy to one side for now. Therapy works when you put the work in, and to do that you need to be personally committed. It’s not as effective when your reason for being there is “mum made me come”.

We found occupational therapy much more useful than psychology as an early teen . I went to the sessions, and brought it home to ds. Actually attending sessions set us back in other ways. But with the therapist I worked out a sensory profile for ds, and learned how to make day to day experiences more tolerable. We reduced sensory torments and triggers, increased regulating sensory input, and that made a massive difference to resilience,

In school, he needed a safe way to leave overwhelming situations. Just creating that option helped massively.

Of course, the individual subjects are not an issue, it’s the way that it removes them from the ‘normal’ experiences of their peers that tends to be the issue. Presumably, if she’s 13, these subjects will become optional pretty soon (although games lessons are presumably also an issue… which does usually continue as a requirement through to 16).

I hope you find a solution at school that works for her. From your more recent updates it sounds like food is a more pressing concern.

Just remember that she needs you and you will need a lot of reserves to cope long term, so you need to ‘fit your own oxygen mask first’. It’s not sustainable to be driving 90 mins to get Maltesers- perhaps to get her a full, healthy meal it might be vaguely reasonable, but not for empty calories. I think you’re in danger of encouraging an eating disorder rather than the opposite in that particular case. ASD teenagers are not immune to the ‘normal’ teenager behaviours of selfishness and boundary pushing. Other posters have given great advice about how you can give her some agency and control without needing to give her everything she asks for.

This is the problem, in my experience, where children in mainstream have a lot of time off-timetable/dropping some subjects/not going on trips. It seems like a reasonable adjustment and that it should help, and for some it does, if it’s a short-term step while e.g. figuring out longer-term strategies that work best for them, having therapy, etc. Otherwise, they actually are just missing huge chunks of the curriculum and they can’t catch up easily so feel behind and they often feel left-out and isolated, that people are looking at them or talking about them (and there’s no getting round it, the other kids are aware of the absence of a member of their class - usually not unkindly). In my experience (~10 students over the last 5/6 years) it’s rare that those students do better in school over time (or even stay the same), they usually end up missing more and more school over time and it spirals. The school has provided so much support to help them but fundamentally, mainstream just isn’t going to work for them. Alternative provision or homeschool is probably a better option earlier on in these situations.

It's actually American and available on kindle etc.

Plant the ideas and hope they come round!

I'm not sure how anyone thinks they can force someone to take medication or do therapy.

I would love to read it but I'm not in the UK so can't order it. 😕

I find it so hard to know what is ASD, what is anxiety and what is being a 13 year old!
It's probably a bit of all.

I work with teenagers with unclear diagnosis and what they almost all have in common is a mixture of not being understood by their parents and using this as a mean to manipulate to get their parents to feel helpless and letting them get their way.

What I was taught is that it's usually the parent that needs support and therapy more than the teenager.

Parents need to gain -or regain- confidence in their parenting. Ultimately, it is them that should be in control of what happens. At the same time, they need to be open to understanding their child's needs.

This involves Trust and Communication. There are a number books that provide guidance. Trust needs to be established on both sides and for this communication needs to be fluid and vice versa.

Each need to be able to talk about their needs and be listened to. Compromises then need to be found.

For instance, mum want teenager to do the washing up right after dinner. Teenager says that dinner is stressful for them so need to relax listening to music afterwards. They agree that teenager does washing up listening to music without the need to engage with parent.

The worse thing you can do is dramatising her situation and acting like you constantly need to make allowance to make up for how hard she has it. You need to acknowledge her difficulties without feeling sorry for her and compensating. Compromises go both ways and at the end, YOU are the parent and should always have the upper say.

I'm the mother of a 10 year old autistic and ADHD daughter. It's rough and I feel you. My daughter also finds demands difficult at times. Especially when she's dysregulated.
I have to take the demand away and give options. So in the situation you're describing I would probably say something like
"You're really struggling. I know that you feel that if everyone does the same as you that will help, but that isn't possible or realistic. These are the options you can choose from.

1. We will sit and choose a therapist together, and the three of us will work together so that we can find the best way to help you.

1. We will sit and choose a therapist together, and before/at the appointment you will write down your thoughts and I will read them to the therapist so that we can work together to help you."

Two clear options may remove the demand, and help DD agree to something because by giving her options you're not actually telling her what to do. She still has choice.

I'm on milder on of noise sensory. I found foam earplugs and sleep phones work well though did take me 2 years to adapt. I find audio book with known story stops blank speeding mind
Asd dc pref his amazon echo dot to play story to him while he sleeps.
All comprises as we couldn't have the quiet house as brothers are classic adhders

Friends dd found therapy that wasn't therapy helpful. She did art class (therapy) and lego therapy with an autism girls group. Friend had to bribe her to go - try 4 sessions and I will get you/do x y and z.
She didn't have to talk just do the activity that was infront of her, no pressure, clear instructions on what to do. She kept on going. I think she said it was 6 months before she said a word but she slowly relaxed and it helped

I think you'd also like the SPACE book... See upthread.

@leafybrew my DS has two medications that increase his chances of not dying. One is anti epileptic and one is a stimulant for his ADHD. He has to take both. We don't want him going into a coma but we also don't want him impulsively running out in front of a car.
You can bet your socks he has to take them. Luckily he will take them if we don't let him have screen time till he does. Actually, now they are a habit he just takes them anyway with no bother. But we've had to use bribery. When he was 6 it was jam or chocolate.

Thank you. I was starting to feel like a terrible person for saying that.

My ASD DD is 15 and we have been through a very tough time too. I changed her school and her OCD and anxiety went through the roof but it was the right decision as her new school is so much more accommodating and nurturing. She didn’t want to change schools but I knew it was for her own good in the long run and luckily she is not as wilful as your DD sounds. She couldn’t engage with counselling either but her new school has set her up with speech and language therapy and I have hired a lovely SEN tutor, both of which have helped build her confidence as they seem to know how to engage with her better. Her new school have given her one to one drumming lessons, which she has shown a talent for, which is also great. She has been on medication (sertraline) for five months and I think it has helped a bit, but it’s hard to know. It hasn’t been a miracle cure. We waited 18 months on the CAHMS waiting list to get it. If you have access to counselling yourself, I found that useful. I was finding her daily tearful phone calls from school so distressing for example as I didn’t know how to help or fix the issues when I was stuck at work, miles away. My therapist told me she probably didn’t expect me to fix anything, she just wanted me to acknowledge she was finding things hard and feel heard. Just a small thing like this was so helpful in taking that pressure off me in these moments a bit. I sympathise so much as I know all you want to do is give your child a happy childhood and it does feel impossible. I tell myself one day at a time and to enjoy the occasional good times. Best of luck.

Yeah right - have you actually had to deal with a severely depressed autistic teenager?

Your approach might work for some, but there is no 'one size fits all'.