[quote]Chushin wrote:
May be a stupid question, but is he in treatment / therapy for the OCD /OCPD? (BTW, they are often found together).
Much progress has been made with such trxt. Is he on any meds? The right SSRI might attentuate his responses.
Then again, if he himself sees no problem…[/quote]
As it is told to me, he is considered “Permanently Disabled” by Washington State and on the GAX program. The way the state handles mental health issues is really bizarre. They don’t seem to pay for much of anything really. His family gets 339$ a month and he has medical coverage, but it’s incredibly limited treatment wise. He’s seen several different psychologists, each of them gives a different recommendation for treatment and most of them contradict each other. He’s not on medication at the moment because in the past he had been put on medications that he had a bad reaction to and two doctors proscribed medications that created some toxic combination that nearly killed him even though they both knew exactly what he was on when they proscribed them to him. He has a tough time trusting Doctors.
They don’t really do anything for him about his OCD/OCPD, his family tries to manage his anxiety issues as best they can and he’s become rather adept at managing them himself. Usually his method of management is by avoidance. Because of the nature of his dietary issues he doesn’t eat out, he doesn’t eat with friends, when he goes to other peoples homes if they aren’t aware of the issues he just turns down offers of food and drink. For family any get together, BBQ’s in the summer and holidays his food has to be prepared for him a certain way, usually he takes care of it, and if not his mother prepares what she knows he likes. Though sometimes they mix things up. At the most recent Thanksgiving we traveled and they seemed to have forgotten about him. He ended up eating less than 8oz of food in a 24 hour period and instead of complaining about it he just. Dealt. He doesn’t really throw fits like some of the Autism spectrum people you see on TV, when he gets nervous or has a panic attack he gets quiet and paces and obviously looks agitated.
In some ways he’s astonishingly intelligent and intuitive, in others (like social interaction) he’s just…blind. The biggest part of the problem is how it’s been portrayed in pop culture, people just don’t understand and if you spend time around him you can tell how much it frustrates him that he can’t be “normal” like other people. As I understand it, when he is doing something repetitive and can’t stop, he KNOWS what he is doing is abnormal, he just can’t stop himself, and when people get angry about it it just increases his own frustration and he tries to avoid interacting with people in the future. He KNOWS its wrong, he KNOWS he should stop, he WANTS to stop. He just can’t. I can’t even imagine how that must feel. I watched him attempt to wash a pan by hand for three hours once. It was clean, I suspect a part of him knew that, but every time he looked at it he would see something that would make him soap up and start scrubbing it again. His family knows not to bother trying to force him to stop. He’ll stop eventually.
In some ways it’s incredibly amusing to watch him watch people interact, in others its sad. He watches people intently, gauging, analyzing, absorbing, and if you spend enough time around him you can see him trying to apply what he’s learned, but it’s just a bit off because it doesn’t come naturally to him like it does to the rest of us.
I know he has lived on his own several times in the past and worked full time jobs. Something always seems to happen to send him home though. My understanding is that he ends up neglecting himself in favor of helping other people.(Allowing homeless people to live on his living room floor etc) They even had to take his food stamps away because he ended up feeding two homeless gentlemen with them instead of himself. That doesn’t really fit with what I know about people in the autism spectrum though. Other times he has confrontations with people that don’t understand his peculiarities and it sours interpersonal relationships.
Note: The state will only pay for him to see a psychologist when it’s time for his 6 month or 1 year “review”. He may or may not see the same pyschologist twice in a row. That is pretty much the extent of his “treatment”. Other than that they do something through Compass Health which seems to only provide mental health evaluation and medication administration. His family is concerned that some asshole is going to have him involuntarily committed to some kind of institution. He doesn’t need an institution, he just needs people around him who are educated. He can live a normal life, just because it’s different than what we experience doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to be given the same chance to live a life.