Adolescents with OCD at School
Because academic and social issues play such a major role in your adolescent's day-to-day life, OCD issues will be magnified when he enters high school. By the age of fourteen, if his OCD has been present for some period of time, the youngster may have formed many OCD-related behavioral patterns and avoidance strategies which, though they may have worked when he was younger, do not stand up to the pressures of adolescence. One reason why this is true is that parents are less able to shield their children from the social and academic consequences of a child's OCD behaviors in the high school setting, where more independence and accountability are required for the student to succeed there.
Some OCD-related issues, which may take on added weight in high school, include the following:
Difficulty concentrating, following directions and completing assignments in class; concentration can be hindered by the adolescent's persistent, repetitive thoughts, which often take on higher stakes with the added pressures of standardized tests.
Social isolation or withdrawal from peers is often made more intense by the more complex social interactions between boys and girls at this stage.
Low self-esteem in social and academic activities can hamper a student's success in high school.
Medication side effects can sometimes be as debilitating and distracting as the OCD symptoms.
Learning disorders that are often overlooked as the treatment for OCD takes precedence can become especially detrimental, as academic subjects in high school require greater and more sophisticated reading, writing, and presentation skills.
Many of the accommodations and school interventions introduced in Chapter 11 take on an even greater importance as the student with OCD enters high school. These are some of the school strategies that help older students:
Allow more time to complete homework and in-class assignments.
Accommodate late arrivals when there are problems at home.
Allow the student to tape-record homework if he has trouble writing.
Give the student a choice of projects if he has difficulty beginning a certain task.
Allow the student to change the sequence or numbering of items in homework assignments if he has problems involving odd or even number sequences.
Adjust the homework load (stretch it out or change sequence of due dates) to reduce likelihood of the students becoming overwhelmed.
Break up school attendance with at-home independent study to offer breaks.
Negotiate expectations for transitions within school hours, for example, between classroom assignments or between classes.
How can a parent help the secondary school student with OCD? Encourage your student to change her own expectations of her school performance to bring them more in alignment with her OCD treatment progress — thus far. Cheer her on with success stories you gather from other mothers. Flexibility needs to be applied to attendance, grades, social success, and other standard measures of high school performance. The rest of this chapter focuses on specific areas of OCD symptoms that can be especially troubling for adolescents, and some strategies for handling them.
