Not So Sunny California
New Member
Checking in. I'll try to give you my story in a "nutshell" which as you all know is impossible. Been married 20 years. We adopted a boy prenatal drug exposed. By the time adopted difficult child hit school age, he began to show signs of learning disability and some health issues. His weight exploded by 2nd grade and he was obese (partly genetic). By 2nd grade he was funded by the school district and placed in a private non-public-school specializing in Learning Disability (LD). He was also diagnosed with ADD. By 6th grade he was moved to another school, and again in 8th. He has now gone through every NPS in our area. When he was about 13 he began really showing strange behavior. We went from psychiatrist to psychiatrist. He was placed on various ADD medications, tried Wellbutrin, and Ablity. He became physically violent, mostly towards mom. He began cutting and burning himself. He started smoking, experimenting with pot, alcohol and cocaine. By this time he is 6 feet tall, 330 pounds! We had two private nuero-psychiatric reports and two school district reports. Last year the school district gave us all the approvals required for placement, except placement itself. We tried "wrap around" for 9 months, which is basically an in-house support group. NOW we are going to the IEP meeting with the placement team to move him to Residential Treatment Center (RTC). We put him in a short term 45 day unit and hope to move him in the next two weeks. We had to hire a team to get him out of bed and take him to the facility due to his violence especially in the car. I don't know how much of a fight I will have to get him to a location in Utah, not our home state of CA. Oh yeah, and did I say he likes to play with knives, fire, gangs, on and on.