eco - huge hugs! I haven't been in your shoes - yet - but given the extreme challenge of our first year of middle school this year, I can easily see my DS in the exact same space as yours. Reacting in all the same ways - overwhelmed by out-of-control anxiety, internalizing and shutting down, embracing the futility of it all. DS has recently discovered existential depression with a vengeance, and it would be but a small step with unsupportive teachers in a competitive environment to put us right where you are. Your DS sounds like he is terrified, overwhelmed, and feels out of control and utterly incapable. He needs you to help him change all of those things before he has any capacity to think, let alone take responsibility for these projects.

So I I totally agree with those who've said this is a serious crisis, and you need to engage all scaffolding and support on hyper-drive. But I also understand the fear of creating a precedent that feels like allowing escape and avoidance. We constantly struggle with our own DS, who brings avoidance of hard/ anxiety-inducing things to an extreme. So I am pondering one approach that might possibly help walk this tightrope. Could it be helpful to sit with him and really, really explicitly talk through the purpose of each assignment? Together identify specifically what is the key skill/ knowledge that he needs to demonstrate to his teacher via this particular project. And then scaffold the living daylights out of every other aspect of the project. Scribe, cut-and-paste, organize, draw - anything that is peripheral to the knowledge or skills he needs to demonstrate, get that time-consuming make-work out of his way. Let him focus on the concepts, the ideas, and pulling them together in the right words, and for the duration of the crisis, you, the mechanics fairy, will take care of all the rest of the tedious bits.

Also, as other have suggested, take at look at the format requirements and see where they might have room for flexibility. My DS, for example, can write in Power Point with much less pain than essay form; it's just less intimidating somehow. He also finds Inspiration helpful: he creates in a visual form, and the software transforms it into an essay or presentation form (http://www.inspiration.com/Inspiration). What formats induce the least anxiety in your DS? Poster? Oral? Pre-recorded oral? Timelines? Something else entirely? To what extent can you convert some parts or all of any of these projects into a better format for him? I know you've had a horrible time getting accommodations for him, but is there any chance that at least one of his teachers would work with him to agree on an abbreviated written format (like poster, for example, or a visual mapping of key concepts) combined with an oral Q&A session between DS and teacher, where DS can demonstrate the breadth of his understanding?

I guess what I am try to get at is looking for ways to find a balance where he realizes that (1) he is totally responsible for the content and the thinking, and it's his knowledge that must be demonstrated; BUT (2) you've totally got his back, and you are there for him. Any labor-intensive mechanisms, make-work, and miscellaneous stuff that isn't part of that core responsibility that belongs to him, well, you've got that covered.