I have come to learn that who you are, where you live, how educated you are, how informed you are, along with many other things, impact whether you will “get” a diagnosis for your kid.

A highly educated professional with links to the upper echelons of the psychiatric community where I live replied “You are too well educated and too middle class to be on anyone’s radar” when I explained the situation with The Boy.  She was only saying what I already knew.

In the middle of an ongoing crisis in our family I was told by a social worker that she was sorry she hadn’t been in touch (for 3 weeks) as she had been “dealing with an emergency all week”.  She knew everything that was going on for us but clearly our emergency wasn’t emergent enough to hold her attention.

Over the last 7 years we have seen…

2 Occupational Therapists
2 Psychiatrists
2 Psychologists
4 Social Workers
A Paediatric Mental Health Nurse
A Play Therapist
and A Fairy Godparent, ok A Parenting Coach but she may as well be called a Fairy Godparent

One of the psychologists talked to The Boy for about 3 hours in total before insisting on referring him elsewhere.  The place he was referred to had a year long waiting list, didn’t actually talk to him and discharged him without so much as a backward glance.  The second psychologist assessed him (without actually talking to him) for one atypical cognitive dysfunction (ADHD) but nothing else.  The play therapist saw him for about 25 hours, declared him fixed and when I explained that his actions at home were unchanged suggested I seek therapy for my negativity.  Both psychiatrists, neither of whom actually talked to him, said there was nothing wrong with him, and discharged him.

Doctors here are loath to diagnose anxiety & ODD and the likes of DMDD, PANS, PANDAS,  and PDA aren’t even an option.

Colleagues and friends in the US are in completely different situations.  They have alphabet soup for breakfast.  Diagnoses are handed out like Smarties.  Pills and therapies come fast behind that.

And yet they are still showing up with the same problems I was dealing with.  The pills and therapies aren’t a magic wand.  They were where I was, on the bad side of a parenting issue with no idea how to deal with it.

I can’t count how many times I was told it was a parenting issue without being given any advice on how to resolve those parenting issues.  That was a diagnosis I just couldn’t accept because to accept that diagnosis I would have to acknowledge that I was partly responsible for the fact that we got to where we were.  And to do that I would have to accept that I was part of the solution.

Different geography would put me on a psychiatrist’s radar
Different social class would put me on a social worker’s radar
Different educational or professional status would put me on a social worker’s, or child protection service’s radar

Being on a different radar wouldn’t actually save us.

When I left the last psychiatrists office I stopped looking for a diagnosis, mainly because even if he had a diagnosis of ASD there are no services for kids with ASD here unless I access private services.

No one was going to come along with a magic pill or therapy that would fix The Boy and make life the way I had imagined it would be.  No knight in shining armour was going to climb up the tower and save me.

As loathe as I was to admit it, I was the one who was going to have to save us, but in order to do that I was going to have to save myself first.  I would have to be my own knight in shining armour.