1. When can you get him a new teacher and what can you do to make sure the new teacher will take his issues seriously?

2. At home, and if you can at school because you don't have to put it in terms of "sensory", something simple that might help (knowing that that description matches me well), is when open ended questions are too hard to answer, give choices. "What do you want for dinner?" might be too hard to process while dealing with overload. No thoughts will come to mind. However, given options, something might sound better than something else. (Same thing for other questions, the trick is you want to make sure its still him answering and not you prompting answers that get chosen only because you said them)

3. In this state, its not just doing that's hard, its thinking that's hard. Thinking is hard, doing hurts. Knowing is hard. Everything is wrong.

4. This is in fact a shutdown. There are multiple styles of shutdown.

5. Has he been sleeping more?

6. Have the shutdowns been getting worse week to week?



When someone is in overload, you need to get them out of overload. When he's overloading at home because of school because school isn't taking him seriously, you need to find a way to without disrupting your schedule get him out of overload at home.

Shutdowns might not look as bad as a meltdown, but they can last longer, and they can compound more in terms of how people think. Meltdowns have more impact on others, shutdowns have a lot of impact within one's self if management methods aren't figured out.

So, my immediate suggestion is figure out a few things that calm him down and make a ritual of doing those immediately after coming home from school, and then after that go into the rest of the day. Make that part of the sensory diet, but make sure its fun.

For me that'd be something like give me some peppermint snack (because a snack is good for people in general and peppermint is good for me), and then wrap me up in my weighted blanket and play a game that I need to play while in my blanket.

And then after that we can see what state I'm in. Or what state he's in.

I don't know if that'd help but its my immediate response.