DS first term at uni & having a meltdown. Worried sick

[Teencheang]

DS 19 has always struggled with organisation, prioritising things, being unable to follow instructions and being scatty and forgetful. He would often miss out whole pages in tests at school because he just didn’t see them or make the silliest errors. Goodness knows how he got into university at all.

Here we are nearing the end of the first term and things are getting worse by the day. He forgets to eat and then almost passes out, stays up most of the night gaming I think as he says he can’t sleep anyway and that it helps his anxiety, then sleeps half the day and misses lectures etc. He sets two alarms but sleeps through them. It took him weeks to organise the admin stuff when he started and he still hasn’t managed to open a student bank account. He looks pale and sickly. All work is done at the last minute because he says he cannot motivate himself, that’s if he’s actually remembered to do it. Then his anxiety goes through the roof. Thing is, he’s actually very smart.

Im at my wits end. I don’t know how I can help or even if I should be stepping in here.

Thanks in advance for any advice or opinions.

People with ADHD often spend their lives being told they are lazy or stupid. I would have hoped that schools would have wised up to the fact that apparently "lazy" students who can't organise themselves are very likely to have ADHD. This message given to children is a huge contributory factor as to why ADHDers are very likely to also suffer from anxiety and depression.

It's a bit late now, but had you asked for advice earlier I would have said ignore the fucking school and trust your instincts. They often have their own agenda, misconceptions or don't have the knowledge to make the judgement. My DS's primary insisted on telling me it wasn't worth getting go him assessed all the way through primary despite his many difficulties. Turns out he has ASC and ADHD. 🙄

As PPs have said Student Services at his Uni should be able to arrange an assessment. The uni will often pay for a private one to get it done quickly (NHS usually have very long waiting lists).

He should also be able to apply for DSA once diagnosed:

www.gov.uk/disabled-students-allowance-dsa

The fact he's made it to university without a diagnosis and support is testament to him. He must be very bright.

What everyone else says.
I would be paying for a private neuropsychologist assessment and be looking to get some suitable meds as quickly as possible.

I also thought of ADHD.

My foster son has recently been assessed for ADHD.

All I would say is don't hold your breath. He was on the waiting list for nearly five years for his assessment. And he was meant to be a priority as he's a foster child.

Frustratingly he's now in his last year of school so this assessment hasn't helped during his education. However, he does have dyslexia and an EHCP anyway, and I've always told school that all professionals who work with him believe he has ADHD.

Dd was the same at uni. She eventually went to support services and disability support and was diagnosed adhd in her final year. It took an academic year from initial referral to diagnosis.

Uni were great with her, including her department. There should be a tutor he can go to as well.

Poor you, this must be so worrying.

An ADHD assessment is so important here. His self esteem must be taking a real knock, and knowing he had adhd will take a lot of the shame out of it.

Meds and some coping techniques can make a huge difference.

I am neurodiverse and I so, so had someone like you helping me when I was his age. You sound like a great mum.

He sounds like me.i am sure i have adhd.There is a lot to do to help.He needs to have a routine for sleeping and eating and make lists to direct himself.

Unis are very good with this. They will have facilities for doing adhd tests and additional support. Ironically I was too disorganised to fill out the assement questionnaire 🤣 this was me at uni and so yes I probably do have it. Still struggle with mornings, procrastination and time management. Have got slightly better with age due to building plethora of coping mechanisms.

To be fair to the school, schools don't assess for ADHD and nor do teachers have training in this generally.

I've learnt way more useful stuff for teaching having a child with ADHD than vice versa.

On the plus side, university support services can be quite good these days.

You will probably need to organise and pay for an ADHD assessment. You can try googling "local authority name for university + local offer" and see what support groups come up - once you've found some other parents you should be able to find who diagnoses round there. Or ask your own GP for help over the Xmas holidays.

I can’t comment of the adhd, but if it’s not possible to get him supported to get back on track relatively soon, would it be possible to transfer to a uni near home and he can live at home, or at least near enough for you to be on hand to support?

I think stepping in is necessary here, if the poor thing is forgetting to eat.

Must be difficult for you too but maybe consider this year a 'false start', bring him home and see what help / changes / meds can be done?

Feed him up over christmas. 😊

It sounds like adhd. Meds would help massively if it is. He can have a private diagnosis quite quickly if you can afford it. NHS will obviously be longer.

We suspect my dd has adhd but she doesn't currently want to be assessed. Visuals help her , so a print out of time table. Reminders on her phone too. We have a shared calendar which can be used to alert her to stuff.

Eating at specific times linked to a specific place she will be. So she walks past a cafe on way to uni she got in habit of picking up a sandwich. It works better in a routine. And having food to hand helps to. This year she's developed an interest in cooking so her and her bf eat evening meals together.

Definitely involve student services this can help with extensions and managing timetable

Some CBT could help with coping stratagems.

A last resort would be come home and study nearer to home so he can commute.

Lizs has good advice here. You wouldn't believe the number of students who are diagnosed with something at Uni rather than at school. It's the combination of the pressures of the new environment and increasing workloads. The usual coping mechanisms can't keep up. My job was to assess for technical and study/exam help after the DSA.

Definitely go the private route and get him assessed. The GP waiting list will be long and he won't be high priority. The school being unhelpful shouldn't have stopped you taking the initiative, especially if he kept telling you it was an issue and teachers were nagging about his issues. The system is stretched to breaking point and only you will put him first. There may be waiting lists for private assessment too but at least they'll be shorter, and the uni may well be more helpful than the school was. It's really hard with him being so far away. I hope you can step in and help him to get a diagnosis and support so he's better able to cope.

Definitely student services - they will help

OP, I had a lovely boyfriend in my 20s who was EXACTLY like this at university. He was extraordinarily capable intellectually but ended up dropping out as a result of missing so many lectures. It was exactly like you describe your son in terms of sleeping through alarms, procrastination and disorganisation. He was eventually diagnosed with ADHD at age 40, by which time it had really impacted his life because he took years to get a degree and hold down a job. It also impacted his self-esteem and honestly had a huge impact on our young relationship because without knowing what was underlying it, it felt to me as his partner that he didn’t really care about the (significant) impact it had on our life together.

I’m not saying this to alarm you, only to urge you to take it seriously and intervene because he likely can’t help himself and will get stuck in a downward spiral. He needs an ADHD diagnosis and support. If that means taking a year out from uni and returning with the right support in place, then that is a way better outcome than this impacting him negatively for years to come. It is totally treatable with the right help.

I agree with the ADHD assessment - alongside putting in place some strategies to organise himself pending the outcome. Even if he gets a diagnosis, it still needs this. I really strongly recommend that he sets himself a hard pre-deadline deadline for each piece of work, probably 1-2 days before it's actually due in, so that he has time to go over the complete draft, and can then turn it in calmly the night before or morning that it is due. If you are prone to deadline-itis, you have to get used to moving the deadline yourself or will never get through a dissertation, for example (for that, I recommend 3 weeks before for a complete first draft). Move the panic all-nighter stage forward, and allow then some time to actually perfect the work. My attitude was always that being a student was my job - it was a minimum of a 9-5 and the lectures and taught sessions were meetings that I would have to attend in the job, and that the 3 years were about building the skills for the real world.

He also really needs to deal with the getting up alarm thing over the holidays - it can be really dangerous as well as very annoying to everyone else in halls. I spent the first two years of uni living with someone who slept through alarms, drove us all insane, it got to the point when we would be banging on her door in tears telling her to turn the bloody thing off after it had been going off every 5 minutes for 4+ hours when we were trying to study. She became so used to be comatose during alarms, she then started failing to wake up for the fire alarm, so we used to have to bang and bang and bang on the door until she came to. It got to the point where she had to leave her door unlocked at night so we could go in and physically shake her awake.... which was just as well as one of the fires was a real one. But again, a diagnosis and medication won't resolve this, needs to deal with it.

The not eating won't be helping with the getting up, probably running on empty. Does he have a kettle in his room? If so, things can cook with just a kettle (noodles, cous cous, quick cook pasta, and a pyrex dish where can leave to stew in the boiling water) were things I found really helpful when I couldn't prise myself away to cook properly, or couldn't physically get in the kitchens to cook.

Include food as part of the routine that you will no doubt be working on him to put together over the holidays. So Monday night is pasta. Tuesday is Taco Tuesday at the student union and I will budget £5 per week for that, etc etc. Grab and go breakfasts - cereal bars, bananas, protein shakes. Not ideal but something with some calories and if you pick well some nutrition.

Set time limiters on the games. No more than x number of hours at a time, and nothing will work after midnight. Yes you can get round them, but it sounds like its the reminder to either do something productive or go to bed that's the issue.

We’re heading into an ADHD assessment for my 13 year old who sounds just like your son. It’s going to be nearly £1k and waiting list a month, but it was years long on NHS. He had an assessment age 10 and didn’t get a diagnosis as school didn’t recognise he was struggling, but as demand has got higher in secondary he is less able to cope. The doctor said inattentive ADHD is often missed for years in bright children - they can do enough that they fly under the radar. If my DS was left to his own devices it would totally fall apart - he is only doing ok-ish with a LOT of scaffolding. School would never have identified my son as SEN - he is not throwing chairs or failing miserably so he’s not high on their priority list, but once we’ve actually got the SENCO to speak to all his teachers they all independently say he has lots of ADHD traits so I’m hoping we get somewhere. We’ve been aware of an issue since he was about 8.
If you can afford a private assessment it can likely be arranged fairly quickly and it seems like Uni is much better resourced than school when it comes to support.

Ask student services if they have a mentoring scheme, make sure he tells his module leaders and personal tutor he's struggling and suspects adhd. Plenty of neurodivergent academics.

This is all really interesting to read, the OPs son sounds very much like my DS, who is currently only just keeping his head above water in his second shot at Uni.
He first went 4 years ago, and we had to pull him out just before the end of his term, as he was spiralling down so quickly. His mental health was really badly affected, and tbh is still not great. He couldn't bring himself to reach out to take the help offered from Student services, couldn't go to lectures, panicked because he'd missed so much, and more scarily, was so isolated that he didn't even know the names of his flat mates.
He'd always been scatty and disorganised, but managed at school due to help at home and supportive friends, who would organise him to go out.
Once he was away from home, he seemed unable to adhere to timetables and plans, couldn't find his way to places ( like lecture halls) or manage basic personal maintenance. Of course he knew how to cook and work a washing machine, but somehow couldn't do it.
We brought him home in the end just before the end of term, in order not to incur fees and accommodation costs the next term. And then Covid hit, so we were very pleased we'd got him home.
He's now at a different, slightly nearer uni, on a different course, where he's made a few friends. He is still struggling with deadlines, and his sleep is terrible.
I suppose what I'd like to know, is what difference does an ADHD diagnosis make? He hasn't got the restless sort, it's the inattentive,procrastinating sort.
Does medication work for that?
He thinks he's got it, but of course can't actually get himself to the GP- we'llhave another shot at that when he comes home for Christmas.
But what would they actually do to help? We've tried the practical stuff, like planners and phone reminders, but once he gets anxious, he just freezes.

I’d also like to know how a diagnosis helps. DS at 6th form is showing lots of AdHD traits and always has but is really resistant to letting doctors ‘inside his head’. But DH and I are at the end of our rope trying to get him to perform to his abilities.

He sounds just like my 20 year old. Chronically disorganised then gets into a huge flap and panic over exams. He is living at home so I can prompt him to eat and change his pants but if he were away from home I'm not sure he;d manage the basics of supermarket shopping and doing laundry.

He was assessed for dyspraxia in 2020, and then again for ADHD last year by a consultant psychiatrist. He said that DS did have ADD but not the hyperactivity bit. His behaviour is not a problem, he was never the "naughty" child who couldn't sit still at school so flew under the radar. He is not on medication (yet) but having an explanation about why he is the way he is helps considerably. Once students have the "label" it helps them access the university's disability and wellbeing service, DS has a named special advisor he can go to with any issues, and has access to special training and software.

ADHD assessment on the NHS is almost impossible to access though, we had to go private for DS, although he did ask the GP first about shared care and what sort of diagnosis they'd accept. He had 2 assessments of about 2 hours each, I had to fill in endless questionnaires about my pregnancy and his behaviour as a baby/toddler, they wanted to see all his old school reports (which were full of X struggles to stay on task, X cannot manage his time, X is easily distracted) and they were very thorough. I think it cost about £2k.

Can you afford a private assessment? It would make internal services more accessible and the meds might be a game changer, if appropriate.

The problem in saying uni isn’t for him is that it would mean it practically wasn’t for anyone who is neurodiverse and while loath to diagnose he does sound like a perfect fit for adhd. He can flourish with the right support.

Getting the meds is a WHOLE other battle at the moment. The diagnosis is the first step. DS has found that having a reason helps, he was constantly comparing himself to other, more put together people and getting quite down about why he didn't measure up.

This

He needs to learn some self-discipline. It’s hard but it’s what most adults do. And otherwise he’s going to fail at life.

But you may need to let him fail so that he realises this. A bit like an alcoholic reaching rock-bottom as a wake up call to get their life together.

For a start he needs to cut out the all-night gaming.

Of course, I’m sure there’ll be some sort of pathologising of his behaviour-!is he ADHD etc? But he still needs to teach himself these basic life skills.

Self-discipline is tough but it’s what most people manage. And successful people manage it well.

Maybe he’s not mature enough for university yet?