There is a pattern underneath every other story on this site. I never gave it its own article. Today it happened again, so here it is.
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 just goes on, 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. Every single place works correctly inside its own narrow mandate, and together they produce nothing. That is why I call it a pattern and not a single failure: each station works, it just never leads anywhere.
And I am the one standing in the middle of this chain, paying for it: the phone calls, the waiting rooms, the hours of explaining my case to each new person, the disappointment every time. When the chain ends in nothing, that nothing lands on me.
This is what they call support.