Mental illness as an autistic child.

Today we got our son back. He was discharged from the inpatient program at Childrens. Now he has two weeks of outpatient care.

Besides autism and ADHD, the psychiatric nurse practitioner thinks we may be dealing with some sort of genetic loading for an anti social personality disorder. I don’t mean to be harsh, but his birth parents are a mess. The next two weeks are to help lock down the diagnosis and determine pharmaceutical and therapy treatments. It’s highly unlikely he’ll ever be able to care for himself as an adult. The nurse was surprised we hadn’t had any law enforcement encounters yet. It’s likely he’ll need to be in a group home as an adult. I just hope we can help him adjust enough that he can be happy and stay out of harms way.

There are a lot of options we’ll be exploring. I’m in the process of getting him on medicaid. He’ll likely be on full disability at some point. My wife, unfortunately, seems to have given up. I don’t blame her at all. She’s been assaulted, several times, by him. He may be small but she is too. I think she’s afraid of him and afraid for him.

I’m mentally just trying to work through this. At least I’ve got him back. We’re going to hike in the mountains this weekend.