With this head banging that J does, I got to thinking last night about the effects on his brain, his skull, his skin and his health, that constant and hard head banging must affect them.
I was told by the psychologist that I should ignore his head banging ; that it gives him a reaction which will encourage him to do it again.
He head banged around December of 2009 and then it died off. He took it up again around November/December of 2010 and even though for a time it appeared he had stopped, he had'nt and the intensity of his banging is quite voracious.
I have Googled the impact of repeated head banging, and it does not make for positive reading. There can be many negative implications, as expected, and I now feel that being told to ignore it is not actually the correct procedure, as he is doing some serious damage I believe.
He had blood shot eyes yesterday and I could only attribute that to the banging. He had no noxious substance that he could have wiped into his eyes, and coupled with him blinking his eyes repeatedly with a head flick, I am at a loss to find blame on anything else.
I reported the head banging to our GP so as to have a record of it and to try to prove that it is not in fact myself causing these injuries to his forehead but himself. The GP was, as seems to be more and more these days, non plussed and did'nt really bother to examine, investigate, question or probe further into it.
It is not a GP's field as they are as their title informs 'general practioners', so unless they had specialised in the field of autism and its ilk then they will not understand.
I am at a loss as to what to do. Our local service provider for special needs children really does'nt seem to have a clue either. Their service has been patchy and shoddy to say the least and to be honest, to have their resident psychologist come out to visit us, take notes of what I tell him, then tell me to ignore the behaviour seems a waste of time and effort. We have been going round in circles with it and with them and I just do not see a way to make him stop.
He will not wear or tolerate those special helmets to prevent damage from head banging either. He is very capable of removing them, even if they are tricky or have many locks. And if it took him ten minutes to work out how to remove it, he will spend those ten minutes screaming and fighting and when it is finally off of his head he will head bang even more. Catch 22.
