stress - how do you cope now that you can't turn to food?

Becky, thank you for the courage it takes to start a thread like this.  I'm so sorry to hear about your son but grateful they were able to find a diagnosis.  Hopefully that will help.   You seem like such a wonderful person!!  I know your son has a terrific advocate for his needs. My older daughter has schizoaffective disorder (schizophrenia plus bipolar) and borderline personality disorder.  It manifested when she turned 13, which is also when I was diagnosed with my second bout with breast cancer.  Needless to say, there were many, many sleepless nights and there just wasn't anything that could be done to make the pain and stress go away.  It's relatively easy for many of us to handle problems that crop up for us, but so difficult when it's your child. What worked for my family was reaching out to United Way.  We were able to get family-preservation services: a social worker came to our house every week to counsel the whole family; a mentoring program paired up my daughter with a college graduate student who was focusing on child development issues; a tutoring program helped my daughter keep up with her classes.  We would never have survived without that help, and I still give generously to the programs that helped us, as well as speak before the legislature and other funding sources whenever they need an advocate for funding. I took up walking and eventually became a marathon walker.  Walking provided me with a physical outlet for my stress, it was calming and gave me some "me" time, and it also took me outside the house, where just the chance to wave "hi" to neighbors and listen to the birds and see people walking their dogs lifted my spirits immensely!   When things calmed down a bit at home, I joined a marathon training program that helps train people to run/walk marathons and also raise funds to fight blood cancers.  (But I wouldn't have had the time to do that when we were in crisis mode.) Personally, I get a lot of benefit from volunteering.  It is a big stress reliever for me, and I get a morale boost from interacting with other volunteers and seeing that what I'm doing makes a difference.  When things with my daughter were bad, I volunteered for an organization that partnered law-enforcement agencies with community recreation programs for kids in trouble with the law -- and my daughter was able to do some of the work with me.  I helped organize a children's marathon (the kids had eight weeks to run or walk 26.2 miles), and she enjoyed some of the things we did to pull that together, such as making signs for the main event  and helping send out mailings to schools. I know it's not a stress reliever for everyone, but I get immense release from my troubles that way.  I have always been able to find activities that my kids could join in on if they wanted to, so that it was a kind of team-building exercise for our family and gave us a chance to relate with one another in a venue that was different from our at-home routine. You know, the Autism Society of North Carolina has an annual Ribbon Run 5k race in the fall.  Wouldn't it be kind of cool if we had an OH team participating?