Re: hospitalization and anti-psychotics

[Guest guest]

Pam:

Figuring out that my son's rages were anxiety reactions came about after

several years of enduring it and not knowing what the hell we were looking at.

But after reading and reading about OCD (particularly Tamar Chansky's book and

" the Difficult Child " book by Dr. Green), we basically started looking at the

meltdowns afterwards and looking for triggers. We rarely saw them in the

middle of it all back then - it took looking backwards to figure out how a

particular rage episode might have started. For instance the Gatorade episode:

a few

days later we talked to our son at a calm time about Gatorade, and he

admitted he was terrified of half-drank bottles, and then also told us he was

afraid

of those sweating paper cups you get drinks from at Mcs. A more

complicated one is his time trigger. It took several episodes where we found

the one

thing in common that started it all was him feeling he didn't have enough

time to do something. I liken it to CSI forensic investigation. I come up with

a theory and confirm it at a later time when he's calm. The more we confirmed

this, the more we realized that the ONLY time he raged was when the OCD was

triggered. So if he started to escalate, we got better at diffusing it by

identifying the OCD trigger before he lost all control. Depending on the

situation, we either removed the trigger or identified it as OCD for him and

tried to

help him boss back his fears. Figuring this out was a huge " lightbulb " moment

for us.

As far as the best case scenario, it was usually to gather up the family and

leave the room, since we really couldn't get him isolated we'd isolate

ourselves. I only did this if I felt he was not going to hurt himself. He'd

scream

and bang on our doors or maybe throw things, but no one was getting hurt. When

we talked about it at a more calm time, he did tell me that it increased his

anxiety in a meltdown for me to leave him alone, so we developed a deal that I

would stay in the room with him during a rage but only if he did not hurt me.

And then I bought earplugs and waited it out. But if he laid hands on me I

left. That was my limit. His brother got really good at spending time alone

playing in his room ...sigh...

One more thing. Our pdoc gave us hydroxizine hcl to give him during meltdowns

- sort of like an antihistamine but supposed to be a calming effect. I

wasn't all that successful at getting him to take it once he got to meltdown

stage,

but it's another possibility. Benadryl is similar and over the counter so it

would be easy to try to see if it has any effect for him.

- , MI

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