The other day we got a call from school, my daughter deliberately injured herself. She came home with a badly bruised and bleeding forehead. If you think being a parent is scary, try being a special needs parent.
She's recently been also scratching the skin out of both me and the teachers out of frustration, and wetting the bed at night and she peed her pants at school too. She's 8 years old and toilet trained for a while now. She's also progressed from slapping herself from frustration, to punching herself! (in a REALLY strong, hurtful way).
The school therapists / specialists / teachers have all been asking us to take her back to private therapy sessions, as well back to medication again.
I refused on both for the following reasons:
1) We've been taking her to therapy (speech, occupational, behavioral, sensory, you name it) for years in Portugal and we haven't seen a shred of improvement. In the meantime, it cost us a fortune (about a salary's worth every single month!).
Don't think that I don't know that this takes time to work. But I've seen a proper therapist at work (I always attend their therapy sessions for both my daughter and son), and that was in Pakistan.
My son didn't just suffer from apraxia of speech (he was completely non-verbal, and he was screaming his lungs out from the time he was awake until bedtime). He also had developmental delays, major motor skill issues, behavioral issues etc. He was almost as autistic as my daughter is (although he wasn't diagnosed as such). And that lovely lady in Pakistan from Lahore Children's Center, she didn't just let him play with the sensory toys and equipment for the whole 45 minute session like they do here in Portugal.
She put him to work! She was strict, and she knew how to grab his attention. She knew techniques that none of the therapists in Portugal applied for my daughter. After 2 years of intensive therapy, he's now a freaking mathematical genius with a full vocabulary, asks a million questions and won't shut up lol. His motor skills have caught up with his peers too. He can shower, dress himself, cook, clean, even repair a broken toy lol.
So in a nutshell: Private clinics here are all about the money, they are not interested in making an impact (the free therapy offered in public schools here is a different story, and we are very happy with that).
We've tried 2-3 different private clinics, all disappointing. If I DO find a good private special needs therapist, I won't think twice about bankrupting us again for the sake of my daughter.
2) The medication that was prescribed for her before were (or similar to) anti-depressants / anti-anxiety pills (pills which I am experienced with as well, and would never recommend them for anyone). They came with their side effects and didn't really help much. And of course, as soon as the prescription finished, we were back to square one.
It was hard to explain and argue this with her therapists and doctors, but I've seen enough in my lifetime to know, not to trust modern medicine blindly.
It's been hard lately for all of us. In the next article, I will go through the need (and the what) of supplementation, and why you shouldn't trust that blindly either.