JT. I want to say Hi. It is late here. I am sorry there is not more time to reply. And I am sorry for your suffering which you do not deserve and never deserved.
It is not your fault.
If he needs Residential Treatment Center (RTC), the school district should bear the cost, I think. Or your health insurance. You need an advocate. There are free attorneys depending on where you live. Disability Rights is the group I used. There are remedies even if there are barriers for payment. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
The other kids do need to be protected, as do the pets. It is not good for your son to be in the situation where he could cause harm. He needs to be protected, too.
The first priority is safety. The second is an emergency IEP, to address his needs NOW. And getting on the same page as your husband which is essential. No relationship is unscathed from this kind of situation.
You must, must forgive yourself. First, it is mean and cruel mother-bashing. Which has to stop. Second, you need to be whole and strong to get through this. For your son, your daughters, and yourself.
If he does need residential treatment it would be best for HIM that he have this opportunity where he will learn ways of self-control, self-awareness and self-soothing. I know adult kids who went to residential treatment who are are fine now.
To get support, I would start a thread for every single one of these issues and to get the problem outside of you onto the page. Believe me this helps immeasurably. For you to see and to respond to what you think and feel.
I think many of us found this place by desperate google searches. Mine, I think was:
mentally ill homeless adult child.
Today was a hard, hard day for me and I googled:
I want to die. Sometimes it gets to the point where I have to get those words outside of my head. (I read that everything I put in a google search is collated somewhere and it never ever disappears.
Hi Google. I am beyond caring, sometimes.)
You are not alone. Remember that.
PS You might ask the IEP or your pediatrician for a functional behavioral analysis. I will explain tomorrow if you want. I would ask for a referral to a child neurologist at a Children's Hospital or University Hospital near you (Medical School) where you can see a faculty member in the Neuropsychiatry clinic, for children. I would also request from the pediatrician an evaluation from a neuropsychologist. You can find those in the Child Development Clinic in a Children's Hospital. All of this if requested through your doctor in circumstances such as yours will be paid by insurance. All of these things will help in the IEP.
I want to tell you why I think it may be important to get the neurological consults. There is a type of seizure activity which is associated with the autism spectrum. Seizures which are undetectable or unrecognizable as seizures even by physicians. I found a citation of a book by Caren Haines
Silently Seizing: Common, Unrecognized, and Frequently Missed Seizures and Their Potentially Damaging Impact on Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders. She is a RN and her son is on the spectrum.
He had different symptoms than does your son (staring out into space, etc.) but she explains if they go untreated they can cause serious psychological illness. That said, when children feel something is going on inside of them that they do not understand they cannot communicate it to their parents. They expect that their parents make it go away. When their parents do not, the child may get angry. Or conversely they may feel that the distress they experience but do not understand signifies that they are a bad child and deserve to suffer. And this makes them mad, too.
All of this that I typed below I am tempted to erase, because it sounds to me like it is too advice-giving. And impossibly hard to do. For you and for me. But I am leaving it because in my better self, I do try to strive for this. Except the problem is that striving so hard to do this aspirational thing makes me vulnerable to the deepest despair. Because in striving to do the best I can, I leave myself unprotected and then feel desolate and destroyed. I am leaving this part in, because I want you to see how heroic you are. And how you are holding yourself to the most impossible standard. So please recognize that NOBODY could do what I suggest. Not one person. In particular, me. I try and I fail.
I would try to start from the place of trying to see him as SUFFERING and unable to communicate it. And you are his advocate, not his victim. Of course this is very, very difficult. Today and yesterday I had a very hard time with my 28 year old son and I very much felt, and was his victim. For today. That is how I felt, and I really felt I could not take more, and I would not take more. Honestly I felt I did not want to ever see or speak to him again. I think I even told him that. He was afraid.
What you are going through is NORMAL for the situation you are in. And the way he seems to be acting, this angry opposition has to have a basis. This extreme hostility. The key here for each of us is to try to regain some perspective and objectivity. My own son is thoughtless and self-centered. But my sense today and yesterday, that he is cruel and trying to destroy me, is wrong. But the thing is, there are things that are not motivated by cruelty whose effects are cruelly felt. That is our problem. Your problem and mine too. Nobody wants to be hurt. You are only human. And you are trying very, very hard. So am I.