We are going to meet (her and me both) with her university psychologist who is a specialist in the specific type of trauma she sustained, so hopefully we can get some traction with that meeting before going back to the disability office.
It has been extremely frustrating to know that she needs-- something-- but for her mental health professionals to shrug and say "well, I'm not really the person to say what classroom practices need to look like...avoid courses with exams, then... talk to the disability office-- what do they suggest?"
and what they have to offer is apparently blank expressions and "we don't really recommend particular accommodations, you understand-- you need to have a mental health professional recommend something specific and we'll evaluate it for approval in a few weeks..."
Professors have been generally pretty positive-- but she already has exams outside of the classroom setting, and extended deadlines, approved class absences, etc. as a result of her extant/preexisting disability, and they often aren't sure what else they can do. Some have ignored even those, or refused to return phone calls, meet to discreetly discuss disability matters, etc. You can imagine the additional stress that kind of nonsense causes.
You get the idea. I've spent hundreds of hours in meetings this past two years just on DD's mental health and how to help her get better. I've learned a very great deal in the past two years about PTSD and what is-- and is not-- known about it, and how to treat it or not.
What I suspect, based on knowing how faculty tend to think, is that she probably needs a menu of things that she and a faculty member can choose from in a particular class. That way faculty maintain a sense that they have autonomy over assessment-- which is a huge thing for most faculty, by the way.
She'd like to take her exams orally with a trusted proctor-- sometimes it could be the professor, but sometimes the professor would add to her stress level if she doesn't get along with him/her well. She would also like the chance to recover credit if she experienced a flare during testing, and to perhaps be able to take assessments open-notes due to her memory/retrieval problems when under stress. She says that during exams, it's often as though she's trying to read a heavily 'redacted' document when recalling things in her notes or from a text, or auditory recollections. It's like-- she knows everything around it, but not the thing she's trying so hard to remember. It's stubbornly fuzzy/blanked out. Often, she can recall the information almost immediately upon leaving the exam.
Sometimes, though, she dissociates during testing-- and that is the worst exam performance by far, and it also results in her not even really have any recall of testing, or what she does recall is spotty and inaccurate. So she can walk out of a test and think "Hm. Well, I guess that was okay" only to recover more fragments over the following 24 hours or so, and realize that she may well have failed the assessment. Not by looking things up-- just by the memory coming back slowly as the dissociative state dissipates.
