Hi, I am looking for strategies to try and help mitigate our current situation which I have described below.
Our 14 year old daughter is a type 1 diabetic with mental health issues.
She self-harms and engages in risk-taking behaviours.
Overdosing had been going on for about 18 months but only identified as such since August 2017 when the other behaviours also surfaced.
She was under medication but this was quickly abandoned and community engagement given preference as the best way to achieve a balanced outcome.
She is currently with AMYOS for community-based care and treatment and LCCH for in-patient episodes.
There has been no identified reason (apart from the obvious stress of being diabetic) for any of the above issues, or rather they may have been identified to health professionals however in the interests of ensuring her privacy we are not privy to them.
She has been admitted to a number of hospitals.
Her admittances to hospital are now weekly and usually involve both QAS and QPS to be in attendance.
She will abscond without hesitation if she is not at home and hide, so far last week this has happened twice once from a sporting acivity and once from a scheduled diabetes-related appointment, the last time required two shifts of QPS and a SAR heli.
She will then walk up to a stranger and say she can't go home because she isn't safe. So far she has been fortunate with this approach however sooner or later her luck will run out.
This absconding has happened around 15 times during the past 6 months.
Her home is now a safe zone where unsafe items are at least two locked doors away from her at any time.
We have a 6 ft fence and all external doors are either locked 24x7 and/or have push button access to exit to which she does not know the code.
We don't particularly like doing this but we have no real choice in the matter.
She no longer has access to phones because she uses them to hassle and complain to friends in order to garner attention and sympathy.
She has low self-esteem and body image and appears to have alienated most of her school friends.
She says we do not 'allow her to do anything'. The last time we 'allowed her to do something' by herself she met a girl 3 years older than her who had befriended her in the adolescent mental health unit and as a result she indulged in further risk-taking behaviours.
We have had to toss her room in order to remove unsafe items.
She comes with all the usual teenage traits of being selfish, self-absorbed, self-centred, attention-seeking and impervious to any reasonable request, and of course loved unconditionally.
If she is admitted to hospital under an EA (examination authority) she will have a security guard in attendance; she will attempt to abscond anyway. If she is not under an EA she will walk out
of the hospital and security will use CCTV to tell police in which direction she ran off.
We have had to carry out CPR on her when despite checking on her every 10 minutes she still managed to get into a situation where this was necessary.
She has excellent spatial awareness. I have seen her in a room at the hospital with four police and she easily evaded them all. She will bide her time and pick the best opportunity for escape; and she can keep up this level of awareness for hours.
When she is discharged from hospital she will attempt to unlock the child-locks on the car doors, if we do not monitor this or forget to do so due to a combination of tiredness and/or stress she will attempt to exit the moving vehicle at speed on the way home from the hospital. She will attempt a similar action via windows in police cars unless handcuffed.
Local QAS and QPS know all of us by name, as do most of the hospital staff. We are on a first name basis with hospital security guards and know some of their life stories.
Thinking about joining the hospital's loyalty card program, after 10 admissions we apparently are entitled to a free gift of a small carton of diazepam.
That last one was a joke as obviously if it were true we'd be able to start our own pharmacy.
We have now reached the point where our daughter's needs are all covered.
Now its ours (but still with a focus on our daughter), for example my wife has recently seriously considered just leaving and I don't blame her.
There is no way she can continue to stay awake 18x7. She doesn't need pastoral care or people telling her what a great job she is doing or how hard it must be for us.
We've had that. We are over it. We need some practical non-medical assistance.
We are now at the stage where Child Safety will be getting involved because we can't continue to provide the level of care that our daughter requires and still remain as a viable family unit.
Does anyone else have similar issues and what strategies do you use to combat them? I'm not talking about the medical side, that's covered.
I'm referring specifically to what happens at home once all the medical professionals have exited the scene.
1) How do you handle absconding?
2) What, if any parenting strategies do you use to try and get a child to keep safe, i.e. acknowledge her diabetes and make some attempt to help us (or herself) deal with it?
3) What do you do about respite care? We've tried FACC who gave us DSQ and some other support links we don't need. Diabetes isn't a disability and mental health is medically treatable so we aren't eligible for respite via them. DSQ gave me some numbers of respite care to call and I was about to do that, all of them appear to be for aged care or people with a disability.
thanks
ujb
