How Not to Find a Shrink

The new headmaster convinced me that the school could do it. A big, bearded guy with a long career in education, he was exuberant about getting a kid with some issues. He showed me every room in that school, spreading his arms wide, booming "Doesn't it look like we can do everything here? We can do everything but a self-contained classroom." He adjusted his blue and white knit kippah and gave me a goofy grin. I was sold; that was before we knew.

Max's entry into kindergarten was okay. His teacher, Mrs. M., had a quality that Dave and I can't quite describe. Sometimes we meet someone, and we tell them about Max, and there's a look they get; they know what we're talking about. They don't say anything that would tell us that, they don't have to, Dave and I can just tell. Sometimes they say less than most people do when we talk about Max. But Mrs. M. had that quality.

Prospects was part of our weirdo routine. Max's notebook from Prospects traveled everywhere with him now. He had goals for school, goals for home, goals for Prospects. He got points for doing things he was supposed to. He never understood that some rules are the same everywhere. If he wasn't allowed to scream obscenities at home, then that wasn't allowed other places, for instance. max could make no sense of that. He was transitioning poorly. When recess ended and the kids came inside, Max would stay riled up for hours. He couldn't just settle down and listen. Things were deteriorating as October approached, and somehow, Prospects rushed him into a graduation. I know now that September is always a good month for Max. I don't know why, although lots of kids with bipolar have a seasonality to their symptoms. So Max graduated, and we were done. But things were getting worse, not better.

We needed a new psychiatrist. We had been able to continuing seeing Dr. L. because Max was at Prospects. Now that Max wasn't at Prospects, we had no shrink. And Dr. L. had no advice on where to find one. I think he knew that most of them are awful, and that Max was totally out of their league. in an extreme cop-out, he proclaimed, "Max is not a private practice kind of kid". He was right of course. Dr. L. was always right. but my kid needed a shrink.

I called all over. The Yale Child Study Center was going to be seeing kids at Greenwich Hospital, where Dave works. But they didn't know when that might be, and never called me back when I left messages. The Child Guidance Center of Stamford felt that Max was "too sick" for their agency. Thus began an inter-agency battle between Prospects, hosted by the Norwalk Child Guidance Center, and Stamford's center.

I had a hard time understanding that Max was too sick. I mean, they offered psychiatric care, right? To whom? There were un-sick kids who saw a psychiatrist? I couldn't read between the lines yet.

I'm Going to Help You

That's what the first psychologist kept saying.  She resembled a troll; less than five feet tall, I surprisingly found myself looking down to talk to her.  She almost never wore shoes, only slippers in her home-office, tucked under the side of a large yellow Dutch colonial on a private road in New Canaan. There were images of Golden Retrievers everywhere.  Her therapy dogs were always Goldens, she told me  It seemed sweet, and almost normal, the therapy dog thing.  It made it seem like taking a five year old to a psychologist was a normal thing that normal people did.  But it wasn't.  And despite the New York-accented nasally "I'm going to help you", I knew it wasn't normal.
She hadn't met Max yet, not when she first said it.  We had told her everything we thought we knew.  He was impossible to discipline, despite all efforts with setting limits, sticker charts, cajoling.  The child was miserable, and he was taking us along with him.  He never understood the consequences of his actions, so much so that we doubted that any consequence made sense at all.  He had tantrums that would last an hour, but they weren't about anything.  Things would be OK, everyone walking on eggshells through our lives, when suddenly the bomb that was Max would go off.  He would thrash on the floor so violently that I had to move furniture out of the way to keep him safe, as if he were having a seizure.  Our family was functioning in crisis mode, but the crisis never ended.
We put our hope in the psychologists oddly small hands.  We endured weeks of testing, piles of forms to fill out; we meticulously described eating habits, sleeping habits, family history of everything from depression to learning disabilities.  She spent hours with him, astonished over his lack of desire to be toilet-trained. 
She tested his empathy, his I.Q., his understanding of reality, and a wide variety of aspects of his learning.  He had tremendous difficulty with spatial relations, which seemed to excite her.  The Aspergers Syndrome Diagnostic Scale (ASDS) indicated Aspergers was "Highly Likely".  Of course, we didn't know that the ASDS mattered until years later.  Literally. Years. Later.
When she told us the results of the testing, she leaned forward as she spoke, desperate to share her findings with us.  She diagnosed Max with "Non Verbal Learning Disorder", in which she was an expert.  We were lucky, really, because she was going to help us!  Many people do not accept that NLD exists as a unique diagnosis, but our troll doctor did.  And she just kept smiling, and looking delighted that Max had "NLD", even as she said it was just the worst thing to have because these kids just have no social skills, high rates of depression and anxiety, but, she did assure us, and put in bold in her report "NLD is NOT an autism spectrum disorder".  And she just kept saying that she was going to help us.  But she didn't.
She sent us home with vague advice and a bibliography.  Amazon made loads off Max's "NLD", and still makes annoying NLD book recommendations when we log on.  Months later, things were still beyond miserable, getting worse all the time, so she referred us to our first pediatric psychiatrist.