Joshua Dixon: An Autistic Victim

We have written Joshua's story many times, but in brief, Joshua has lost 13 years of his life to a system that has made many diagnosis about him with no evidence and medicated him to the point where we as a family hardly recognised anymore and clinging onto memories before this nightmare began.

I'm 2010, Joshua was an intelligent young man with some family suspicions that he was on the autistic spectrum, but this in itself was not a problem because he was a loving, fun, intelligent, peaceful young man, who had learnt many languages and had the prospect of becoming a linguist.

Autistic people are obsessive about things and ideas and Joshua too became with a video game that he played night and day for a week or more.

The lack of sleep affected him and he started to act slightly out of character. We were naive to OCD and autism and lack of sleep, and a GP called a mental health team, who had no understanding of autism or OCD.

He was taken to a children’s mental health hospital and given a very powerful antipsychotic without a diagnosis and became aggressive and confused and any intelligence he had disappeared in a puff of medication.

He left the hospital incapable and needing constant care and in 13 years of medication prescribed by doctors who constantly insisted Joshua had psychosis without no convincing evidence.

It was said in 2020 by a mental health nurse that Joshua didn't have psychosis, 10 years after being medicated with extremely powerful hypnotic mind changing, brain shrinking drugs to say he isn't psychotic.

Joshua looked like a had learning disabilities, but the LD team said he didn't have learning problems. Joshua couldn't be put into any box and it was easier to keep him be treated by a mental health team, as long as they could say he had no capacity they were legally in their right to medicate a healthy developing brain and reduce his whole persona to someone of an extremely young age with behavioural problems which he never had.

For a whole year, he was able to stop medications at home, however due to the affects of heavy mind altering drugs, his brain couldn't cope with the change it had to go back to for Joshua to find himself again.

For one year with support of the community mental health team, who basically told us to ride the withdrawals, waiting for Joshua's mind to rewire. We know is/was possible as we saw signs of maturity for his age of now 30 trying to reveal itself.

However, the medications had interfered immensely with his cognitive skills, memory, body functions, thinking ability, squashing motivation, intelligence at a minimum, and the loss of emotions.

Joshua has experienced time away from home ranging from 7 weeks to 2 years.

In the hospital system, having gone through many restraints and all kinds of degradation. I'm the community, there was also arrests (with one involving a tasering), and countless drugs.

The emotions were the destructive thing for Joshua and the mental health system and police were not patient enough in following through with what had been started to allow freedom from the drugs. His last arrest him firstly into custody for 2 days, an assessment, a week in seclusion, and then a hospital, 30 miles from home.

In the year of our extremely hard working family, it had left a trial of basically a shell of a home that needs some renovation.

Joshua now has the confinement of hospitalization and being medicated all over again, we need to be together everyday and that is causing us considerable expense ourisde of normal living expenses.

We live fragily and are not a family who have wasted money and have never been in a situation where our outgoings are far more than our incomings before.

We are so greatful to those who have given already to keep us together as family and to have a home ready for Joshua to return to, we pray every day that his time from home will be short.

When he dors come home, he will need continued constant care and the NHS services are very limited with what they can offer to help us. It is very likely we might have to seek some private assistance for trauma counselling, for instance.

It scares us all as a family. We look on right now to Joshua helplessly, trying to reassure him that we will always be there, and support him to be himself again, and like an innocent child he had to cling onto that life.