Keeping a child alive and thriving is expensive

Hi, I'm Brigid and I'm asking for help for my child and for our family.

When Chicago Public Schools transitioned from virtual learning back to in-school learning my child went from a very supportive grade school to a far less supportive junior high. Although the students were primarily the same it was a different building with different faculty and staff. My child is Autistic (and has ADHD), and is non-binary and very open about it.

Faculty at my child's school did not notice when other students began bullying my child, when the bullying shifted to harassment, when the harassment shifted to sexual harassment, and when the sexual harassment shifted to sexual assault. When my child did turn to faculty for help the faculty minimized my child's complaints. My child wound up having horrific panic attacks including going nonverbal (which they'd never done before) and physically shaking. This culminated with a suicide attempt in March, where we discovered they'd actually made several attempts.

This launched us into an expensive medical slog as our child was hospitalized, went through a program, and then continued with their weekly therapy and their medication. This is good! These are good things! They've kept our beloved, wonderful, amazing child alive!

But we've also been spending about $200 a month in therapy copays and medication, not counting the hospital stay and the special program which were much more expensive, for over a year now. My kid's been extra depressed lately and they realized it's the one year anniversary of when they started getting SERIOUSLY, as opposed to very, depressed. We already had them in therapy. We've been spending this money for a long time now.

And the problem, fiscally, is that this is a big chunk of money we haven't been using to make credit card payments. We've been making minimum payments, but of course that means interest. A lot of interest. And that interest has been accruing for a year on credit cards we've used on our kid.

So basically we're hoping for a bit of money to help us catch up with our credit cards, and maybe provide a bit of a nicer Christmas for our kid. They don't want much this year - some dinosaurs for a stop motion video they're working on, some Steam games. We're spread really thin because, again.... $200 a month... so it's nice their wishlist is small.

Thanks for reading this far, and please help if you can.