When Your Child with Special Needs is Depressed
by Merely Me
Monday, September 21, 2009
Quinn's Guide to Friendship, Dating and Self-Confidence
When one of our Friends of Quinn members, Kathleen, recently asked about depression and autism spectrum disorders I felt my personal floodgates open. I understand depression both from a clinical perspective of having worked in the mental health field but also from my own life long battle with this mood disorder. But when my son Max who has autism became depressed, I was less able to recognize the warning signs.
There is much information in the literature about depression and learning disabilities and developmental disorders. Our Eileen Bailey gives us a clinical perspective on this topic which you may find here.
I am going to add to this information by sharing my personal experience parenting a child who has learning disabilities, autism, and also suffers from depression. Sometimes it helps to hear how someone has coped with such things firsthand. I am hoping that by sharing my story, that this will be a catalyst for you to share yours. I want to stress that whatever you are currently going through, you are not alone.
When my son Max was about ten years old we began to notice that he was having more behavioral problems. He was acting out more, he was having meltdowns, and he was developing more fears and aversions to things he had no problems with previously. Immediately I chalked all of these changes up to his autism and learning challenges. My background of special education caused me to look to environmental causes first, meaning that I looked to see what triggers or consequences could be reinforcing his behaviors. I developed numerous behavioral plans to help my son with his growing distress. Sometimes the changes we made helped but more often they did not.
When I took Max to his pediatrician and described this dramatic change in his behavior from a child who was fairly content to a child who seemed to have problems with everything, his doctor thought that perhaps these changes in behavior were due to puberty. I did recall my own turbulent adolescence and thought that the doc may have a point. But what could we do about this? You can't stop puberty.
I kept pursuing things from a behavioral/educational point of view as this was what I knew how to do. In addition we tried to give him more choices and more control to try to decrease his meltdowns and tantrums. We also sought help from an Occupational Therapist to work on sensory integration issues with him. You can read about how we helped out son using this method of treatment here.
While our various strategies did help for some things and for some behaviors, my son was still experiencing a lot of agitation and distress each day. I remember I had a friend come over and when she saw Max she stated the obvious, "Maybe he is just depressed." And the more I thought about this the more it seemed a possibility. My son would wake up crying. His crying spells and great anxiety seemed to arise out of thin air with seemingly no external cause. He was beginning to refuse to do things he usually loved to do such as go to parks or even go to the toy store. Max would sometimes get so agitated that it was very difficult to calm him. His sleep was also disrupted. Some nights he would awaken in the middle of the night crying. All of these things strongly suggested that he might have a mood disorder in addition to autism.
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