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Problem with length of counselling appts for people who use AAC (communication aid)
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forgoodnesssake
Community member Posts: 508 Pioneering
I'm not going to name and shame, but just want to flag up an issue
that is currently affecting my adult son who has CP and uses AAC (no
speech).
He has some mental health issues which we have
struggled to find the right support for (another story for another time)
and over the last few months he has been accessing some online
counselling from a disability counselling service that was recommended
by the Bobath Centre and others (it is not the one that has a long post
elsewhere on this board!)
I cannot comment on the quality
of their provision but the thing that is proving extremely difficult to
say the least, is that they flatly refuse to extend the duration of his
appointments to allow for his much slower communication rate with using
AAC and having very poor motor control. This means basically that he
gets about half the time of non-AAC users with the result that on quite a
few occasions the session has ended when he is still in the middle of
trying to deal with a difficult issue which can then trigger a MH
episode afterwards.
I know that many people find that they
would like more than an hour or so in a session, but that generally that
time frame is thought to be about optimum...but my son is not able to
utilise anything like that so is only really getting about 30 minutes,
equivalent, which is not enough.
The organisation have been
asked repeatedly about this being a reasonable adjustment (his GP always
gives him a double appt, for example) but their response is just that
they have made reasonable adjustment by making his course of appts open
ended rather than say 15 sessions.
But that entirely
misses the point that in any one session he does not get enough time and
also as he puts it, he then needs to sort of hang on to issues in his
head and try to start the next session where he left off...which can
actually prolong his anxiety or distress if the issue is a difficult
one.
Of course this could also happen with a longer session, but at least he'd be on a par with a talking person!
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