a little context: i’m visiting relatives in another country, so the cat is 2 years old and is not mine but they are willing to listen to me about medical issues since i’m autistic and they think that makes me smart (as if)… (also english is not my first language, sorry if there are typos).

The cat is itching a lot, his head is the most itchy and he already hurt himself and has a bald spot with a scab that he keeps scratching. We took him today to the vet and they told us that the cause is stress and prescribed an oinment and pills. But even with the pills and oinment he is still itching a lot (and is already 2am at the time of writing this, so like 16 hours for the medicine to kick in i think).

The thing is; if it’s stress, it can return, therefore how can we prevent the cat from stressing so much to start hurting himself? eventually i’ll return home, what can i do to help my relatives with the stressed cat? The vet kept repeating that we just give the cat the pills and oinment.

Also, we don’t understand what is stressing the cat so much. He usually wants a lot of alone time and we don’t force him to be with us, sometimes we want to play with him but he doesn’t seem in the mood almost never but when he is in the mood we always play, he likes scratching shoes that we are using so we start to use only the old shoes inside the house so he can scratch them whenever he feels like it (he also has his own cat toys to scratch).

The only moment we don’t pay attention to him is when we are eating, and he mews at us a lot in those moments and we try to make him feel integrated (?) we give him his food so he can eat with us, we let him smell some items of our food and such but we can’t pet him because we are eating and that would be anti-hygienic.