"My autistic child and our struggles with the mental health system"

My adult child has autism, they don't read or write, they have a mental age of a five-year-old.

My child has been self-harming on and off since they were young.

In the past, we have been able to manage in the house with this self-harm with myself my spouse and my other children one of which is also on the spectrum.

Beginning of this year we saw my child's self harm reach a new level of aggression to themselves to the point where they now have their hands tied, oven mitts on to stop them scratching the skin off their face, clawing their eyes out, punching themselves in the side of the head etc.

We needed to call on extra help so we took them to Armadale emergency department over the course of a week they ended up staying there overnight for a few days.

My child was put on a mental health plan through the Mead clinic in Armadale it was then decided after their behaviours further escalated they should go into inpatient care. For a solid week, I phoned private and public facilities looking for someone who could help us with our child who has never been away from us for an extended period of time, ever. The facilities we ended up in were, I felt, not appropriate for my child. It scared my child but we had no choice, they needed to go into care because we were losing control of our lives and our sanity. Why isn’t there a special facility for disabled mental health patients other than what I believe to be run of the mill facilities that include people on drugs and severe mental illnesses? 

Lucky for us we are Covid free and we’re able to use the Covid Ward at Bentley, I believe it was just dumb luck that we had this facility. My child has been in there six weeks now, they're still self harming, they’re still trying to work out where they're at but we’ve been told recently that if a mental health patient with suspected Covid comes in they will need to re-locate my child back to that scary ward we initially were admitted to.

Not one private facility would look at my child, I believe because of their mental age so what are we supposed to do then? In my opinion, this is not good enough something needs to be done.

We are nowhere near to controlling my child's self harming. Six weeks later, they still have their hands tied, oven mitts on with a scarf wrapped around them they still actively try to get them out to hurt themselves but I feel our time is running out for my child and we will have to take them home and deal with this ourselves. Whilst we are extremely grateful and thankful for being able to use this facility for my child, we don’t know what will happen next time and I feel we need to have something in place for these people.

I’m on several autism forms with families who are constantly going through this sort of behaviour with their autistic children and all are, I believe, on the brink of divorce, depression or suicide in some cases.

Thank you for reading my story, hopefully we can put something in place for my child and others in the future.