Our appt with the neuropsych and our attachment therapist
We had our neuropsych appt today with our attachment therapist. He wasn’t familiar with our kids like our AT is, so it was interesting to hear him describe our kids to a t just based on neurological data and what the numbers represented.
We did Emily first…she has no problems with anxiety or depression, it did point to some problems with attention and ADHD, but it said that she had the fair ability to concentrate once she got going. So, she needs lots of reminders to get her going on her task, but once she’s in the middle of doing it she has a fair amount of concentration to keep going. That was good news about Emily.
Then, we discussed Tracie…she has no problems with anxiety or depression, it did show that she has some problems with concentration, she has a little anomaly (sp?) with her frontal lobe, so she has a lot of issues with processing, sequencing, and trying to figure out how to do things or what she needs to do to do them and we found out that that’s where all of her crying comes in…so we just need to work on teaching her to use her words when she doesn’t know how to do something so that we can walk her through it and teach her some better coping skills. Her scan also points to ADHD. That made me feel better about Tracie and now we know how to help her as well.
Then, we discussed Josiah…it threw us all for a loop as he has the most normal scan of them all. No history of anxiety or depression, his scan points to ADHD, frontal lobe slowing, so problems with thinking and processing, He’s our kid that has to be constantly moving to learn and take everything in (sensory processing). Where the ratio there to show ADHD is normally only double, he’s a little more than triple. He thinks his coping mechanism with it all is his anger, defiance, and destruction. He asked us if you did get him sitting still for a few minutes if he just would go to sleep and we said yes. That’s him. With everything that we’re going through with him, we’re going to start doing neurofeedback. He’s going to give us the first 10 sessions for free as he said there is a small percentage of the population that doesn’t respond, but it can’t hurt anything to try. So, he said if things are moving after the first 10 sessions, that we’d work something out for the cost…he’d charge us so much per visit or I could just make payments until we had it paid off or whatever..he just wants to help. We have to commit to doing them 3-4 times a week at first and then once things get going, we can move to 1-2 times a week after that. We did discuss whether he saw reactive attachment disorder in the scans and he said where he normally sees that in the scans, he didn’t see a problem there with Josiah. However, he thinks that neurologically he may be attached in his own way, but the loving feelings and all that you would show towards people may be covered up by all this anger and aggression that he has right now. That gave me some hope right there. I told him that with all the problems that we’ve had over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been about ready to pull out my hair so I’ll do anything if it has a chance of helping and I know that he gets angry at himself as well. He did say that he gets overstimulated quickly so if we had a place for him to play alone or by himself until he got back in check, that was what we should be doing. We already do it and it causes a huge rage. He wants to be around everyone, but we have the rule of if you hurt someone you need to be separated for awhile. He thought that was good, but I’m going to try explaining to Josiah why that’s good for him and see if hopefully I can help him a bit more there. They did tell me that they think there’s a question on whether his meds need to be upped. I told them that he’s always been my hard to medicate child. He does well on new meds for 2-4 weeks and all of a sudden they quit working. I told them the story of when he was on Clonidine. We started out on a half tablet and worked our way up to where he was taking it 4 times a day. The psychiatrist that was seeing him at the time shook his head once while watching him bounce off the walls in his office and he told me “when I see teenage boys in the psych hospital, I give them a half of a tablet once and it knocks them out for a whole day…he’s on 4 times that dose and it has no effect of tiredness on him at all.” I told him that it did slow him down some, but it never made him tired. That’s making the neuropsych think that maybe there’s a problem with the brain stem and that we need to try to increase the medication and see if that helps for the short-term until we can see if the neurofeedback can help him there as well. I’m going to see if we can move our psych appt up. I discussed all that had happened with him over the course of last week and how he really got out of control on Friday. She told me that the next time that happens, she wants me to take him to Children’s. She told me that if I wasn’t such a good mom that was up for a challenge and Andy wasn’t such a dedicated father, that he would have been in residential treatment a long time ago. That made me feel good…I want to avoid that as much as possible.
We may or may not decide to do it with the girls at a later date…I have a pretty good handle on them. However, he did say that they could probably correct the anomaly with her frontal lobe with neurofeedback, so we may do them later. However, I think Josiah is first and foremost right now. I’ve got to get a handle on him and I know it’s not fun for him either. And if we work on this throughout the summer as much as we can, hopefully that will give him a better chance at doing better in school this year.
Labels: attachment therapy, Emily, Josiah, neuropsych, Tracie