Hello. For those of you with neurodivergent children who are struggling with mental health, would you say that an extreme need for validation from professionals is familiar?
In our situation, it means that although our daughter is seriously struggling with her mental health and eating, she feels as if she needs to be in hospital for either illness to be ‘taken seriously’. She feels that she needs a diagnosis on paper as it were, otherwise she feels as if she is faking her distress.
At the moment, because she is struggling with eating, she feels as if she needs to lose lots of weight in order to be admitted to hospital, and it’s only if she goes to hospital that she feels that she has a right to say she’s ill. Obviously this is a serious threat to her physical health, and she is already losing weight.
She has lots of shame around these thoughts and feelings. She also has extreme mental health crashes whereby she says she doesn’t feel as if she can keep herself safe, and feels strong impulses to hurt herself.
I wonder whether these feelings are related to her autism (black and white thinking in particular), or whether there may be some other issue going on? She is adamant that she will succeed with her plans some day soon. Should we be taking her to hospital when she has these MH ‘storms’?