"Urgent referral leads to an appointment 3 months later"

My special needs stepdaughter who has severe learning disabilities is currently transitioning to adult mental health services. Throughout her adolescence, we have been on the verge of resorting to medication to help manage her challenging behaviours. We are very well versed in using different strategies to deal with this and have in the past had support from a psychiatric nurse.

Dealing with a disinhibited, wilful teenager is far from easy at the best of times but recently things have become almost impossible for us. She uses violence to try and control her environment and is focussing this violence on my wife. My wife is constantly covered in bruises and scratches from my stepdaughter's kicking, pinching and headbutting. This is happening 2 or 3 times a week every week. My wife has an underactive thyroid and is finding all this very difficult to cope with.

We related all this to my stepdaughter's neurologist at the Ryegate Centre in May. He advised us that if he did medicate her, the prescription would expire and need reissuing when she officially fell under adult services in early August. He also said it would be inappropriate for him to decide the type of medication and impose it on adult services. Rather, the professional courtesy was to defer to them and allow them to decide. Given the severity of our situation, he promised to write to adult services and to ask for an urgent referral as soon as possible.

We have now received the appointment from adult services and their idea of an urgent referral is a date in mid September. So we are now left with the prospect of dealing with this intolerable situation on our own for 3 months. Our experience of children services has been fantastic and they are always very patient centric. If this is typical of the support we are going to receive from adult services, then that's very worrying and depressing for us.