Advice needed please

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I have a nine year old daughter that is in the process of being evaluated for ASD and she has in the past talked about killing herself. She didn't mention it for many months but now she is again and even said in front of another little girl yesterday that she wanted to die.

I am taking this very seriously however we do not have any therapists or other such people in place yet and I have no idea who I should contact or if I should. I guess what I am asking is if she says something again - what would you suggest I do?

For a little background here is a link to my intro post

Okay I guess because I am new, I cannot post a link so it is under New to WP - Evaluation next month.

Thank you very much.

I am glad you are taking the statements seriously.

My son was diagnosed PDD-NOS last summer at 9 years old.

He also frequently said he wanted to kill himself or wanted to die. He had been under the treatment of a psychologist (who suggested he was bipolar) since the very first time he said it at 8 years old. Things kept getting worse. In our case, my son was very violent and had awful never-ending rages, so it was not a stretch for me to think that he may actually try to kill himself since he would already hit himself and other things like that.

It got very bad. I made an appt w/ a psychiatrist. The week of the appointment I was driving, my son went into a rage in the back seat, he said 'I am going to kill myself as soon as we get home'. So I went straight to the ER instead of home. They evaluated him and suggested he had an ASD. They referred us to a neuropsychologist for an evaluation.

We went to the psychiatrist later that week and my son was put on an anti-psychotic, Abilify, 3.5mg to control his rages. Once he was on the proper dose, the rages, violence and threats of suicide stopped completely. The next month we had 9 hours of testing and he was diagnosed with PDD-NOS.

This depends on what area you are in - the fastest way to get evaluations and treatments is to go to the ER. IDK if that is necessary since you don't mention if your daughter is violent. You could start by calling the person that will be doing the evaluation next month and telling them what is going on and if they will move the appointment up or what they recommend you do.

Ask her why.

Give her a pencil and paper and let her write her answers.

Be extremely patient.

Do NOT respond to her answers. Ask follow up questions if you want, but any response turns it into an argument. Save the arguments for later.

This sounds like it could be productive. The one thing I'm not sure of is if writing by itself is a stress for the child (which it most certainly was for my son at that age, due to co-morbids). In the OP's intro post, she mentioned fine motor skill issues as an infant; nothing about issues writing today, but that doesn't mean they might not be there.

If writing doesn't work, sometimes drawing or acting? One tool we used with my son at that age was story telling, where I put the characters into situations similar to ones we were concerned about and then would ask him to give me suggestions on how to continue the story. He was and is very much a story teller. A psychiatrist we know suggested that to us and over time I saw some interesting patterns (you can't usually read anything from just one answer).

If you are seeing dangerous rages and you are seriously concerned about keeping her safe within them, then you may have to consider medication, like bjtao suggested. I tend to think of that as a last resort option, but I have no way to tell any one parent when they need to consider last resort, so I leave that entirely to you. You will know if her situation hits home to you.

My NT daughter is the one in my family who flies into rages and talks suicide, but I want to find the source, and feel I can control things well enough to have the luxury of looking for it unmasked (writing this I started to wonder if I'm being marvelously - and dangerously - naive, but I really do not think so). We've made a lot of progress with that, using traditional outlets. I would suggest constant supervision and constant communication as being extremely important. And knowing you have a child that can be physically restrained helps.

Oh, and spend an afternoon reading the book written by one of our young adult AS posters: http://www.ASDstuff.com

It's free, and it covers topics like understanding meltdowns. It will help you focus your concerns quite a bit, I think.