Dd1 7 with Aspergers, possible depression/anxiety advice on where to go from here?

[Marne]

I'm really struggling with dd1 at the moment, for the past few days she has been complaining about 'bad thoughts in her head' and 'being filled with bad thoughts', she has always suffered with anxiety but its always been mainly at night , the past few days she has been saying it whenever she has nothing to do (when she's not busy), she wants me to help but won't tell me what the problem is (i'm not even sure if she knows). Its really upsetting to see her like this , she seems fine when she's at school (buit has always managed to cover her AS traits at school quite well). I'm really worried that she may be upset with something at home (and its my fault), her sister takes up a lot of my time as her Autism is more severe and needs constant supervision, i try and spend time 1:1 with dd1 but its tricky as the more i give her the more she wants and the worse her AS seems.

How can i help her? should i be taking her to the GP (re depression/anxiety)?

Is she stressed about anything? DS 'heard the devil talking to him' and really frightened me - but it turned out to be him worried about changing school

I think it won't hurt to take her to the GP.

I can't think of anything (but then it could be something really small with dd1), she was poorly last week (with a bug) and it seems to be worse sinse but she has'nt showed any anxiety about being ill. Our GP is useless so i may have to change gp's before taking her (i keep meaning to do it as we moved house last sept and we have a gp just down the road).

can someone else take her sister out so you can have time just the two of you to do something together or vice versa does dd1 have a nanny or auntie that gets on great with and if they spend some time away fron your other daughter maybe she will give a hint to whats wrong or it may be simply she needs mum , how old is she? is she under camhs? if you cant get to bottonm of it i would go to gp and ask for a referal ,is there a problem with a particular person or teacher at school ? even though she likes it , could just be she simply needs you too and is a bit envious but dont feel guilty its bloomin hard work

I often take dd1 out while dh looks after dd2, i think dd1 is struggling at school, she say's 'no one wants to play with her' (but this has always been the case) but when we suggest moving her to the local scholl up the road she says 'i don't want to leave my friends', its hard as none of the children want to come over to play as they all live too far away (if she moved to the local school she could have friends come over). I feel guilty that i can't spend more time with her but when we do have time together she just moans and groans. She's only 7 years old but often seems a lot older. I'm not sure if she is still under CAMHS, she hasn't seen anyone since she was diagnosed 3 years ago .

We have similar issues except our dd who is almost 7 is dying to move schools so we going through appeal. My dd has ADHD and possible aspergers, she has always been so happy go lucky but school have well and truly broken her spirit this year and it breaks my heart. Today in the playground dd told another kid she couldn't come to dds party as already too many coming, kid Whinged to mum and mum said loudly "dd is just a horrible girl" really loudly so dd could hear , it was awful and I felt like punching the bitch! It's so hard when they are young and clearly so struggling with life in general, I'm going to take dd to our GP as she is so down all the time and next paed app isn't until may. No advice just I know how you feel

Hi Marne

My ds is 8, has AS and suffers with anxiety and low mood, mainly to do with school.

Two things we've found that help are

1. Giving him a journal to write in - he doesn't do this anymore, in fact he didn't really do it for very long, but it seemed to help him just knowing he could let the thoughts and feelings out if he wanted to.

1. We set up a feelings diary for school. At first he just recorded how the day had been for him at the end of every day using a range of emoticons and a few words. He did this with his teacher at the end of every afternoon, just before he came home. Then after the first half term, I input the numbers of different emoticons that had appeared into an Excel spreadsheet and we produced some pretty pie charts etc that clearly showed him that in actual fact he wasn't unhappy all the time, but had a range of emotions over the weeks and months. This really helped him gain some perspective.

We then refined the feelings diary to incorporate a scale of emotions 0-10 with associated words about how he felt about things (eg, ecstatic, delighted, happy, angry, sad, lonely). We also changed it so he has to fill it in three times a day - at the end of the morning session, after lunch and at the end of the day and so he completes a sentence that explains why he chose the number and word he selected to describe his feelings. His teacher does it with him in the morning and afternoon and he has a designated lunch supervisor that does it after lunch each day.

This has helped in three ways really.

1. First of all he's now able to recognise that he goes through a range of emotions throughout the day, rather than just "I've had the worst day ever" which is what I used to get every day when I collected him.

1. It also enables him to unload all the stress and worry he's carrying around about things that have happened at school, so he can move on.

1. It helps us to keep a track on exactly what is happening at lunch and playtimes etc and what sort of things bother him the most about school.

I would be more than happy to email you a copy of the diary sheet if you'd like me to. Its just a single sheet of A4 done in Word and I put it in a presentation binder and put the last sheet to the back to reveal a new sheet at the front every week.

The other thing that's helped him was the intervention of a lovely EP. We phoned the crisis line at our EP dept when ds was in a terrible state of anxiety on going back to school in September and it was her that helped him work out his feelings scale and language.

Doesn't work for everything though - he is currently upstairs too scared and anxious to sleep after reading a scary book at school about a monster that lived in a wardrobe. Poor kid is actually sweating with fear.

Thank you all for your great tips, will try as many as we can, she woke up this morning still moaning and asked about going to the doctors, when i told her she would have to have time off school so i could take her she changed her mind as she didn't want to miss golden time at school, she spoke a little in the car on the way to school and said she was worried about people not wanting to play with her and people being nasty to her, she gets upset when people wont play what she wants to play and people say her ideas are stupid. So it seems she is struggling to make friends and keep them, she can be a little bit controling and 'in your face' and often cries a lot if she doesn't get her own way so i can see why she has no close friends , i don't know what i can do to help, when i take her to school she is all happy so the teacher doesn't believe me when i tell them what she is like at home and how upset she is.

She seems worse tonight, i don't know what to do now, its the weekend and i don't know if i can get hold of paed or GP, she keeps crying and complaining about feeling sad and worried, i have never seen her like this .

Oh Marne,

You should at least be able to get hold of out of hours GP if you feel you need to, but I'm not sure what they could or would do.

Ds was like this last weekend after something really upset him at school on the Friday. It took until Sunday afternoon to get him to relax a bit. We took his lead, let him stay in his pjs, watch Pokemon and read. I also instigated a lot of cuddles and let him read on my lap, which although he'd never ask for a hug normally, did seem to help.

For tonight, would it help to wrap her in a duvet, snuggled up to you on the sofa and watch a favourite film. I know its late, but it sounds like her anxiety levels need to come down before she can rest.

Will she drink warm milk? It has substances in that actually help us to relax and fall asleep.

If not, could you ask her to draw what she is feeling?

I did this with ds1 when he was in freefall at the beginning of the juniors but we couldn't get to the root of his axiety. I split a page into sections and got him to do a small/basic drawing in each section:

1 for how he feels at home
1 for how he feels at school in his classroom
1 for how he feels at school in the playground
1 for how he feels with me and dh
1 for how he feels with his brother
1 for how he felt about the 'then' new baby.

He normally hates drawing, but he did a basic pencil picture for each section, then I gave him a pack of felt tips and asked him to add some colour. It was stark, the colours in his pictures at home were all warm and friendly, his school pictures were all dark, he drew sad faces on them and the playground picture was all black with a big sad face in the middle. I nearly pulled him out of school there and then.

I showed it to the Ed Psychs and they said it spoke volumes more than they would expect to get out of him in the few session he was allocated and they used it as a basis for their work with him.

If she doesn't want to draw, maybe try just getting her to come up with a colour for each section instead.

Thanks Moose, she seems a little better this morning, dh got up early with her so he could see what she was like when i was'nt there, dh is tougher than me and can ignore her moaning, i'm sure a lot of it is about getting attention from me. I could hear her down stairs asking to go and talk to mummy but dh managed to keep her down stairs and kept her busy, he managed to get some breakfast into her without her moaning. She's now on the PC and has not moaned for at least half an hour .

Marne - I really feel for you. My AS ds has been privately going through a lot of anguish and anxiety that I am only just becoming aware of. At least your dd is able to share her feelings with you, so you can try and help, however painful it is to hear. She is lucky to have you.

Moosemama - I am going to try out your feelings diary idea today!