Therapists

It has been four weeks since my daughter’s therapy finished for ‘09’ and Elizabeth seems to be becoming ahead in leaps in bounds. She is much more relaxed and happy and is making much more eye contact which makes me want to completely reassess her therapy program for this year. Last year was quite disappointing. William Stillman once quoted that Autism is a billion dollar industry. I can see his point. At the end of last year I did six weeks of intensive Speech and Occupational Therapy at $300 an hour. Not one thing was achieved in these six weeks. A non-verbal child the therapists had no idea how to hold Elizabeth’s interest and quickly became jaded. They tried to cover this by suggesting Elizabeth should be tested for Rett's, which is ridiculous considering how physically able she is.

My friend said to me that her little boys Speech Therapist was so boring that he used to fall asleep during the sessions. This has become a reoccurring theme with my daughter’s therapists over the last two years (and there has been many). While they are all genuinely enthusiastic at the beginning, none of them seem to know how to interact with an autistic child and the table tasks they set soon become monotonous and boring. There has even been sessions when Mum and I have stepped in whilst the therapists have sat in the background and done nothing and yet still charged us! In fact, Elizabeth got the most benefit out of the services that were actually free, for example the therapists at the Children’s Therapy Ward (Government funded) at the local hospital who got Elizabeth over her anxiety of small rooms, and I can’t say enough good things about the Special School she attends (again Government funded).

This year I’m determined not to repeat the very expensive mistakes of the previous two years. I’ve sat down and wrote a list of things that I want Elizabeth to achieve this year. The top of this list is a system of communication. Turning four in April Elizabeth is increasingly becoming frustrated that she can’t communicate her wants and needs to us. We’ve given up on the idea of Makaton as Elizabeth still doesn’t point and wave (despite our gentle guidance), so I can’t imagine we would get much success out of signing. We have had a little success out of picture exchange but the implementation of this has been higgly piggly as the Speech Therapists kept changing the rules to suit their mood. So this year I’m recruiting a PECS consultant to help with the task and bypassing the Speech Therapists altogether.

The other skills I want Elizabeth to achieve are basic life skills such as toileting, using a spoon and dressing. In the past I’ve employed an Occupational Therapist to help with these tasks, but that just made the situation more stressful. I’ve found that Elizabeth responds far better to gentle coaxing by her Grandparents and I and she is quite happy to sit on the toilet and go when we take her hand. The biggest challenge is to get her to communicate to us that she needs to go and that is when PECS steps in.

Overall, I want this year to be a lot less stressful and concentrate more on having fun with my daughter. I’m also determined to take one day a week out for myself when Elizabeth attends Kindy to just chill out by going to the movies, reading, writing or catching up with friends over a coffee. I guess you could call these are my New Year’s resolutions.