By CATHERINE MASTERS
Bea Rowe fears she is heading for her second breakdown in two years.
The Waiheke Islander has a 17-year-old autistic and suicidal son who refuses to get out of bed or leave his room and is losing weight because of anorexia .
After struggling to care for him for years - three times she has walked into his room just in time to stop him from killing himself - Mrs Rowe has finally been allocated 12 days of respite care, so she can have a break.
Despite the good news, she has hit a major obstacle. No facilities are available for her son, and she can find nowhere to place him. So she is struggling on, but fears she will break down as she did 18 months ago.
"I get the impression everyone thinks I'm just a neurotic mother and 'it's all right, she'll keep coping you know, it's not like he's going to fall off the face of the earth,' which they're quite right, he's not.
"But that's not the point. My resources in my own body have reached zero. And I have major surgery myself coming up in seven weeks. I'm getting desperate about what I can do, who's going to listen, where are we going to go now. We've tried everywhere.
"You know that ad on the TV with the battery. That's what we are, we're those people and we just have to keep going and going and going and then they wonder why mothers turn around and kill their kids."
She does not believe she would ever go as far as Janine Albury-Thomson, the Palmerston North woman convicted of manslaughter for strangling her teenage autistic daughter, Casey.
But Maree Whitworth, executive officer of the Autistic Association, said it was only a matter of time before another parent killed.
Mrs Rowe was one of 30 desperate families she knew of in the same boat around the country, she said.
The Government had said it would as a priority look at respite care issues, but that did not help families who were not coping right now, she said.
A Health Funding Authority spokesman acknowledged last week that services were needed in the respite care area.
The authority also acknowledged that respite care was one of the best ways to provide support to families so they could continue being carers and was targeting resources at the area.
Mother of autistic teenager heading for breakdown
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