What help do I need?

[WorriesMum23]

Hi. My 16yo has had a rough few years. He’s very intelligent but struggled with exams and exam prep due to a late diagnosed learning difficulty. His confidence took a massive hit. He also had an ADD diagnosis 6 months ago.

over the holidays all he has done is sleep and sit in his room. Eating has been sporadic and this morning he fainted because he hasn’t eaten for 24 hours. This seems to be self harm.

he must be depressed but he won’t talk to us or a therapist. I know he must be terrified about results day coming up but he won’t talk to us.

I feel like sixth form would’ve a mistake for him and he needs some urgent intervention - but what?

I second @EducatingArti‘s comments that he is likely to have learnt his coping mechanisms from you (no shade - I’m working along similar lines with myself and my children) so any good, constructive work you can do with yourself would be beneficial for your son.

My therapist said to me yesterday that if a parent really struggles with something, let’s say feelings of anger or sadness, then when these same feelings show up for the child the parent struggles to support them. So if we can work through our own issues around certain areas, we can be there for our children when they need support with these exact same areas. It made so much sense when he said it, but I may not have articulated it very well.

TL;DR: I recommend seeing a therapist to work on your own stuff.

I should’ve said also - this is obviously in addition to any other lines of support you can get directly for your son of course, certainly not at all instead of.

My work offers some therapy - would psychodynamic psychotherapy be the right one? The others they offer all seem CBT based which don’t seem to work well for me

Sounds like a good place to start, yes. There’s all sorts of modalities - ensure that you’re seeing someone registered with the BACP - and if you find you don’t click with the therapist, move on and find another one. They say that much of the healing work is in the relationship between therapist and client so if the relationship feels off to you, try someone else until you find the person you feel comfortable with.

I wouldn’t send a child with those difficulties to boarding school, sorry. He needs your support, not to be shipped off.

When we looked at schools his sport was the most important thing to him so that was why we ended up where we are.

I will see where we end up tomorrow and take it from there

Psychodynamic therapy is more emotional / subconscious based and looking for schema/ patterns from childhood as far as my own experience showed me. Probably useful OP or integrative too. I had cbt too but from a highly skilled clinical psychologist who also used different modalities - in the wrong hands it can feel a bit patronising and formulaic

thanks. I will give it a go

I don’t know if anyone will know the answer but is it possible for parents to get copies of the gcse results or do I need to rely on ds to share them?

At a guess, I would say that once schools are back, you could ask for copies of ds hasn't shared them by then as he is still a minor and the information should be made available to you under data protection, but I don't know for certain. Good luck for tomorrow!

Thanks! He’s been eating and communicating with his sister (rare) so that’s a positive!!

I know the gp won’t do anything without his consent (I even needed my 12yo consent to get her vaccination record!) so I wonder if school will share

Well he didn’t do as badly as he thought and did really well in a few. Unfortunately badly in one of his a level choices. He won’t talk to us at the moment so have left him to process and left the door open to talk when he’s ready

That sounds like a good plan. I'm glad he had some good results!

Thanks.

post mortem shows he did especially poorly in the essay exams. Despite getting extra time he was completing only 60-80% of the paper. Do you know of anyone that can help with that sort of issue? It’s all in his head (verbally he would get a 9 but putting it on paper he is nowhere near) but he can’t get it out

A scribe would help massively, if it was deemed necessary.

Is that possible? I don’t think his diagnosis is such that he would get one