In September 2019, I posted how medical marijuana (MMJ) had decreased physical aggression and self injury in my son. We have continued to use MMJ for the past five months. In the past two to three weeks, my wife stated that she had seen a significant increase in our son’s aggression. This prompted me to take a deeper dive into what may be causing the increased behavior.
My first assumption was that he may be building a tolerance to the MMJ dosage. On a recent visit with his doctor, I discussed this theory with her and she advised that is not as likely as I presumed. After leaving her office, my wife provided me five months of data on self injury and physical aggression. Using the weekly mean, I plotted a polynomial curve to best fit the data to determine the inflection point. As you can see, something occurred around the end of September.
My son had one of his favorite staff leave to take another job. The replacement staff had also started A few weeks earlier to cross train prior to the staff member leaving. This may seem insignificant to some people, but routine and sameness for my son is very important. To him this was a significant change and his response was to challenge the new staff and those he interacted with daily. He would challenge through his aggression and self injury. So you are aware, he is nonverbal and his actions communicate the strongest messages.
So my theory that he was building a tolerance to the MMJ was not a good assumption. A new staff member started in Mid-August in order to cross train with the outgoing staff member. The outgoing staff member left sometime in mid to late September, which was the true reason for the increase self injury and physical aggression.
Thank God the staff and my wife are keeping good notes on a daily basis. If we would have not looked at this information, we may have increased his dosage of medications or medical marijuana and not ever understood the root cause of the behaviors.
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