Treatment plan time again. Really very few useful conclusions. Everything’s just going to remain the same or roughly so. I now have some weird sort of privilege 3 1/2, because I can go off ward for half an hour now. Not that I can do anything within half an hour here that I couldn’t be doing in fifteen minutes, but well. They say I can go onto the university campus. I don’t know the way there, so that is likely not safe, because getting lost is a significant trigger for meltdowns when I’m outside. They want to set up some thing where the social worker and nurses will take turns accompanying me to my home to surf the Internet – and the social worker even wants to push my sister (who lives 120 miles away) to participate. I was at home surfing the Internet for an entire afternoon alone last Tuesday, but apparently this doesn’t communicate the message. I guess they don’t trust me enough to give me the privileges I need to do this – because I cannot safely go many other places alone, and privileges are calculated by time, not location -, but they ended up giving me a nonsense privilege that isn’t on the system either.
The follow-up option, well, I think I made it pretty clear that I don’t want another training place, but they still nagged me into sometime calling some woman from the autism system who came up with this idea, and they told me to review my definition of “training” and investigate whether it’s the same as the proposed agency’s. As an argument, they used that this agency individualizes quite a lot. Well, my definition of training homes has nothing to do with being individualized or not – the training home I used to attend had a very individual approach, too -, but with the fact that the majority of my life will be structured around goals that are not mine anymore (like doing my own housekeeping) or goals that are mine, but that I don’t want to devote the majority of my life to (like lessening my meltdowns). In order to pursue my real goals – get into a new education, become active in political organizations again, etc. -, I don’t need to live in a training home.
We did agree about a few things, of which one may be surprising – I myself asked to keep the time-out policy as it is. Not because of the stupid arguments the professionals used – that it sets clear limits (it doesn’t) or that it’s a reinforcer not to freak out (it’s hardly anymore) -, but because, at this time and on this (currently very unquiet) ward, I may still be in need of a low-stimulation environment when I’m significantly stuck in overload.
Mostly, we agree about my general status. I am glad my doctor sees the improvement in me, too – and for the first time, I wasn’t annoyed when she said that there was nothing wrong with me within her scope of psychiatric practice (I have Asperger’s, but that’s as far as it goes). It does, of course, still sadden me that, in my current state, I should be able to get out of here, but can’t. The nurse who wrote the nursing contribution (not one of my primary nurses) wrote into it that I might be able to move back home temporarily, while waiting to move to my follow-up place. I don’t think this will work out, honestly: I can deal with being home alone for an entire afternoon, but not for days at a time. I think the majority of the professionals understand this. By the way, neither the psychologist who diagnosed me, nor Gerda were presnet. Both say their jobs are done – I don’t know why, but well.
