There is a pattern this site documents that runs underneath every other story here. I have not yet given it its own article. Today I am, because today it happened again.
You contact an institution, and it tells you it is not the right one and gives you the name of another. You contact that one, and it tells you the same and gives you another name. The next one says the same.
What happened today
I went to a hospital. I waited two hours. The hospital assessed me, told me to wait until the new medication starts working, and gave me the address of an autism centre.
I went to the autism centre. They told me: we do not offer therapy. We are an index. Here is a list of phone numbers you can try.
Days before
The same loop ran in the same shape, days before today. A previous hospital visit. A previous referral to a public psychosocial service. That service emailed me a list of seven private practices in Vienna with experience in the autism area, accompanied by the explicit disclaimer that they cannot guarantee any of them have free capacity. The email's exact words: “ohne Gewähr was freie Kapazitäten betrifft.”
Each phone number on that list is a private practice that costs money I do not have, and none of them is guaranteed to have a slot. To find out, I would have to call seven numbers individually, explain my case to each one, and most likely hear that they are full, or that they cost more per session than I can pay.
The pattern
This is the redirect pattern. Every institution I contact tells me, in different language, the same thing: this is too heavy for our mandate, please go somewhere else. The next one says it too, and the chain extends indefinitely, with no place at the end of it.
The people on the phone are not malicious. The hospital staff did what hospital staff are supposed to do, and the psychosocial service did what it is supposed to do. Each institution functions correctly within its narrow mandate, and still the whole produces nothing. That is what makes it a pattern rather than a single failure: the nodes work, but the connections between them do not.
I am at the centre of this chain, and the cost of running it is mine. The phone calls, the waiting rooms, the hours of explaining the case to each new person, the recurring disappointment: all of it is mine. When the chain produces nothing, I am the one who experiences the nothing.
This is what they call support.