How do you get your kids to go to the shrink, etc?

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I was just attention-hungry, so my mother had no problem getting me to the shrink to get diagnosed. I also thought it would help me get extra help at school in math, because at some schools they don't want to bother to help kids who are failing. I don't know what would have happened if I refused to go; I think since I didn't have behavioral problems (well, maybe mood problems at home) she wouldn't have pushed the issue. She was as ignorant as I am; she thought my diagnosis would get me helped in math, so she would hae either called me a loser and yelled at me and said "You want to fail? Fine!" or she would have gotten a bit sad with this "Oh, what a shame, a wasted chance" attitude and said "If you don't want help in math, fine." or "Are you sure ou don't want some help in math?" and I would have gotten sad, cried and gone after all. All it did was label me, which was exactly what I feared.

If I could have gotten the courage to ask my mother to send me to a shrink, I would have gladly accepted any labels they thought necessary.

As it was though, I spent most of my life under the strong suspicion that I was insane and was simply surrounded by people unwilling to admit it.

I think I may have sort of asked in a veiled way 2 or 3 times. I think my parents considered it a shameful thing.

My daughter was seeing a child therapist for about a year starting when she was first dx'd - she was also dx's with depression (nos) - (there were a lot of things going on in her life at that time).
Sessions ended because the therapist was moving out of the country. My daughter loved having her to talk to. We tried others after her, but my daughter felt like the other therapist talked to her like she was a baby and just tried to dig too deep to the point she would shut down.

Ana - what was your issue with math? Did you not get it, or was it that you just didn't want to do it?
We're really struggling with my daughter and math. Half the time I can see the frustration in her face, but other time I feel she's just not trying. She has every accommodation on her IEP to help her succeed in math - I just don't get why she won't retain anything on the subject.
She is an A/B student in all her other classes - Language Arts being her strongest subject - never needs any help, and never asks for help.

our son went initially because he was depressed and making statements about wanting to die.....no choice but to take him....

I only took my son to be evaluated. There was no ongoing therapy from a psychologist. When I explained the diagnosis to my son, the first thing out of his mouth was this...

"There are other people like me?"

When I said, "yes." He was thrilled .

I have math problems too.

Pulling a quote from one of my blog posts (Thinking Differently):

I stopped talking to my therapist because she basically called me a liar. She had initially put on the whole show about how she wanted to help me/was interested in me etc. But after I told her everything that had happened (the event that led to me being there) she asked if my dad could come in. He completely distorted the events and added things that never happened. Then when he left she started asking questions like "how did you feel when...." about events my dad mentioned that never happened or that he had gotten details wrong on - ie saying I threw the remote control at him, which I never did. I had thrown my gameboy at him.

In addition, I was also pretty uncomfortable with her to begin with just because she was female and all the females in my life prior to that point had been pretty horrible to me. I doubt I ever said I was more comfortable around guys as a kid, but I think anyone with a normal iq should have been able to figure it out pretty quickly. Though i still would have immeditately stopped talking to a guy psychologist if he also showed he thought me to be a liar, I'm sure I would have been much more willing and much less embarassed to go if it were a guy I was being required to see.

About the math, I failed algebra and never understood geometry - in part because of the sheer pointless of it. What kind of idiot needs to write "R=R" when writing a proof. However, trig was awesome. I never studied and I had some of the highest scores in the class.

When I was in elementary school I had an very good therapist. He was a very nice and funny guy who got me addicted to SimCity 2000! This was before I was diagnosed with AS and at the time he though my social issues were simply a mix of ADD, my introverted personality, and my high intelligence making it difficult to interact with my peers.