Should I move house?

[Henriet]

After taking a vow of silence for a year to raise awareness about the difficulties people with learning disabilities have I now find that things are getting very tough for both me and him. I keep facing a brick wall constantly and am considering moving house to have a fresh start away from the traumatic area I have ended up in. My son has really found being cooped up all day long in the 'icebox' as the people at the autism group called it, for weeks on end very tough. But I would feel that I was abandoning him if I moved area now as he loves coming back to his home village. He is the spitting image of me and I love him and can't bear to see him suffering. Ideally I would move with him but he is probably not coming home and I have waited to move hoping he would. Incidentally I have a strong interest in learning disabilities having studied speech therapy for four years years ago. Because of this I had always planned to care for him myself in the family home but lost a series of court cases. (I am also a former legal secretary.). My son's future is the most important now but the launchpad into his adult life has faltered. And contact is still supervised (by people who are not as broadly trained as myself.). I keep rattling off letters of complaint to council social services and solicitors but am not heard. The self fulfilling aspect to having so many nasty things written about you is that they may need to be in place due to the desensitisation to the modes of social policy over time that occurs. Not having powers of attorney, deputyships or the rest of it is very hard. And I even wrote a will to help keep him out of a care home because of the horrors I had witnessed a few years before having my son.

[Hidden]

My son(non verbal, autism, low functioning) is in supported living with 2-4 carers/key workers and doing really well, he goes to college and has started letter tracing. They look after him 24 care and do activities or take him for walks in the park. My experience has been good!

[HolisticMum in reply to Hidden]

What area is that please?

[Henriet in reply to Hidden]

That is great, it would be nice to have good quality care for my son. He is a shadow of his former self and will find it tough to get equal rights to other young people his age and not become bedridden, and incontinent, and isolated in his room behind locked doors rocking from side to side and other stereotypical coping behaviours. It does help if you have backup of some kind. It is often the difference between economic pressures that channel a poorer family into the hands of the care businesses. I have never liked Bradford and he had gone to special school in North Yorkshire, so the economic divide is immense, and in fact this area is also a grammar school area that means that children are more readily filtered off into certain routes.

[HolisticMum]

You sound as if you are living a nightmare and no one will help you. This seems the typical way of this country now, whatever your problem. I really feel for you. I have 2 sons at home and am really worried for their future. Why is it the residential homes become a prison, it beats me to understand how this is in the person's best interests. Can you tell us the area? We are in London.

[Henriet in reply to HolisticMum]

Bradford