ASD, depression, CBT and Our Hopeless Freaking Society
Someone just posted in the Asperger's group, asking advice about their organisational difficulties. They're doing a course of CBT for their depression. The therapy demands that they make plans and keep records. They find they can't do this AND stick to their diet plan at the same time .
For those who can't follow my link, here's my reply, for what it's worth:
I have the same problem, due to the usual neurological stuff ( I think that one comes down to ADD not Asperger's?) Add in poor general health and depresssion, and it got to point where I wound up in a complete financial mess, mostly due to forms not being returned in good time.
At some point I decided i needed to an advocate to help me get out of the hole i was in . Many phone calls later, I actually had myself an independant mental health Advocate. He convinced that i needed actual hands-on help with the organisation problems (believe me, it was hard to accept this, but on reflection, i had to agree) and that this could be arranged.
Actually, it couldn't be arranged, because I didn't have an apprporiate current referral (i'd gotten too sick and depressed to follow referrals through) and the Advocate turned out to be useless, because all he did, on other issues, was call me up out of the blue (just when I was totally anxious about answering the phone) and procrastinate on my behalf (I eventually told him, that's one thing i'm perfectly capable of doing for myself! *chuckle*)
Still, i'm sure this could work out nicely for others :) I just had a bit of bad luck. If i were you (and with the benefit of hindsight) I'd get all the support I can, before i get into a god-awful mess.
I might add that one of those referrals of mine was for CBT. The problem there was that I had to keep cancelling and re-arranging the initial appointment , due to other health problems (And shortage of money for bus fares. Some of the time i actually felt well enough to attend , but i didn't feel well enough to walk all that way. This is now a chronic problem) until finally they lost all record of my original referral. Ah well, I didn't really have a lot of faith in it anyway, but that string of cancellations, together with the possibility that I'd forget to attend the appointment altogether, led me to clean stop making other appointments, as it really didn't seem like a good idea to mess the NHS about like that . I Imean, I might really need them, sometime
Anyways, I'm wondering now if CBT is really appropriate for people who have organisational problems? And I'm thinking to myself, once again, how very mad it is to pigeonhole people according to one problem or another, when it's the interaction between various unrelated problems that really screws most people , most of the time. (In my case, the combo of physical-financial-neurological renders most advice geared towards addressing one problem or another pretty useless. I try to avoid asking advice, cos i really don't like playing "Yes, but...")
I'm thinking too that i maybe had a lucky escape ith CBT, cos I did, from the outset, have an uneasy feeling that it would turn out to be one of thos things that strives, in effect, to hammer square pegs into round holes (something about the "tick the right box" questionairre i was meant to fill in)
And I'm wondering , as usual: is it possible, in this big faceless society, to have support that's geared towards individual human beings, rather than conditions?
i think that's where churches come in, perhaps, and one reason why they keep such a hold on people. But what if you can't be pigeonholed by Faith?
Any thoughts?
Walkie
For those who can't follow my link, here's my reply, for what it's worth:
I have the same problem, due to the usual neurological stuff ( I think that one comes down to ADD not Asperger's?) Add in poor general health and depresssion, and it got to point where I wound up in a complete financial mess, mostly due to forms not being returned in good time.
At some point I decided i needed to an advocate to help me get out of the hole i was in . Many phone calls later, I actually had myself an independant mental health Advocate. He convinced that i needed actual hands-on help with the organisation problems (believe me, it was hard to accept this, but on reflection, i had to agree) and that this could be arranged.
Actually, it couldn't be arranged, because I didn't have an apprporiate current referral (i'd gotten too sick and depressed to follow referrals through) and the Advocate turned out to be useless, because all he did, on other issues, was call me up out of the blue (just when I was totally anxious about answering the phone) and procrastinate on my behalf (I eventually told him, that's one thing i'm perfectly capable of doing for myself! *chuckle*)
Still, i'm sure this could work out nicely for others :) I just had a bit of bad luck. If i were you (and with the benefit of hindsight) I'd get all the support I can, before i get into a god-awful mess.
I might add that one of those referrals of mine was for CBT. The problem there was that I had to keep cancelling and re-arranging the initial appointment , due to other health problems (And shortage of money for bus fares. Some of the time i actually felt well enough to attend , but i didn't feel well enough to walk all that way. This is now a chronic problem) until finally they lost all record of my original referral. Ah well, I didn't really have a lot of faith in it anyway, but that string of cancellations, together with the possibility that I'd forget to attend the appointment altogether, led me to clean stop making other appointments, as it really didn't seem like a good idea to mess the NHS about like that . I Imean, I might really need them, sometime
Anyways, I'm wondering now if CBT is really appropriate for people who have organisational problems? And I'm thinking to myself, once again, how very mad it is to pigeonhole people according to one problem or another, when it's the interaction between various unrelated problems that really screws most people , most of the time. (In my case, the combo of physical-financial-neurological renders most advice geared towards addressing one problem or another pretty useless. I try to avoid asking advice, cos i really don't like playing "Yes, but...")
I'm thinking too that i maybe had a lucky escape ith CBT, cos I did, from the outset, have an uneasy feeling that it would turn out to be one of thos things that strives, in effect, to hammer square pegs into round holes (something about the "tick the right box" questionairre i was meant to fill in)
And I'm wondering , as usual: is it possible, in this big faceless society, to have support that's geared towards individual human beings, rather than conditions?
i think that's where churches come in, perhaps, and one reason why they keep such a hold on people. But what if you can't be pigeonholed by Faith?
Any thoughts?
Walkie