Dealing with public meltdowns

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I've been reading through past posts on how to deal with meltdowns, what causes them, etc, but there didn't seem to be much on how to deal with a child having a meltdown in public.
I'm lucky, I suppose, in that I had experience with watching my parents deal with my brother, and so I knew what wouldn't work with my son. My brother is HFA and we're pretty certain my mom is as well and my dad is like me and I went through the diagnosis process myself so the entire family is on the spectrum. Apparently all our cousins back east are the same so we have over 100 of us, some with an official diagnosis of autism.
However, since we're just learning about being on the spectrum, within the past ten years, we hadn't had access to therapy or any resources growing up. I don't want my sons to go through what happened with my brother, or myself. My oldest is 3 now and he has meltdowns, sometimes more than once a day and I can never tell what's going to start it, or if he'll even have one. One morning I handed him a spoon but I guess it was the wrong spoon because he had a full blown meltdown for over an hour. He's no longer himself, he's more like a wild animal, no way to reason with him and any kind of interaction makes it worse, so I just put him in his room until he calms down.

But how do you handle it in public? I can't just stand in the middle of the store waiting for him to calm down, so I end up hauling him over my shoulder and putting him in the car, but that seems to freak him out more because I can tell he doesn't want to leave the store... (he has meltdowns over leaving the store or going home too). Are there any techniques or anything anyone here has found to help ease a meltdown? Or even prevent one?

Could you use his desire to not leave the environment as leverage? As in, if you don't stop this, we're leaving. ?

Everything we do is based on preventing meltdowns. My experience is that once it has started, there's nothing you can do (except let it run its course in a less troublesome environment). Maybe there is, if your kid is verbal, but still probably not much. They're pretty much just a reality of having an autistic child,, I think.

On preventing them, we do grocery shopping at 4am ("luckily" I have poor sleepers too so they're energetic at 4am anyway), I simply do not take them to the mall or many other places that they will not do well in.

I bring a visual schedule, the "first-then" thing, noise-cancelling headphones, sunglasses, extra socks (my one kid likes to put them over his hands for some reason), something to chew on, and a weighted vest... We also have social stories for pretty much everywhere we go (since the places we go are limited anyway) so I will bring that too.

I don't exactly know what triggers meltdowns either all the time (I know some triggers), but these things do seem to help at least somewhat. I can tell when a meltdown is starting though. My kids each have different "signs" but basically along the lines of getting louder, more disruptive, less responsive... so if I see that happening, I will remove them. We find a quiet spot to be - called "chill out spot". At this point I will try the stuff I brought too; look at the schedule- "first ___, then ____", etc. If it's not happening, we leave. I do not stay in the store if my kid is screaming and lying on the floor. I will (and have) drag(ged) them out if need be. One of my kids is like your kid, in that he gets worse as we're leaving the building as that wasn't the plan, and he hates changes from the plan, however I find that that escalation deescalates more quickly once we leave the "offensive" environment compared to if we never left it at all.

If it's a tantrum, threatening to leave might work. If it's a meltdown, that means it's involuntary and you can't negotiate about it anymore than you can persuade them to grow a third arm. Scolding or threatening punishment will make it worse.

I agree with the above poster. What my parents do is just let it happen. They know most of the time my meltdowns aren't my fault. I do try to have something that comforts me at my side. However, it doesn't always work. Something that usually comforts me during a meltdown is something soft or cuddly.Other than that, it's best for me to just let all that frustration out of my system, and I'll usually calm down after a while.

To prevent meltdowns you have to know what causes them, or be able to see signs that the person is at the very beggining stages of overload and step in with calming/coping strategies immediately (and this might not be realistic if someone gets very overloaded very quickly).

If he is having meltdowns over transitions, it might help to have a routine that you always do before you leave a store. If there are things that you always get every time you go grocery shopping, for example, then buy those things last, in the same order, every time (or at least buy one or two of those things last, same order, every time). Or, make sure that you go from one end of the store to the other as you shop -- maybe go down every aisle in sequence. That way he may be able to see ahead of time where he is in the shopping trip, and be able to predict and get ready for when it will end.

It might also help to give him advance notice that you're going to leave in a certain amount of time or after one or more activities in a specific sequence. Either verbal ones or picture-based ones. e.g. "We're going to go get milk, then we're going to the checkout, and then we're going outside to the car, then we're going home. [....after you get milk...]. We're going to go to the checkout, then we're going outside to the car, then we're going home. [etc.]" For pictures, you could give him or show him a visual schedule with each activity in sequence, shown as a picture that gets removed after it's done.

Another suggestion is to try and make it rewarding in some way to leave the store or go home. I'm not saying you bribe him, necessarily, but maybe just try to schedule things so something that he likes that he would have or could have done anyways (just maybe not right after leaving the store or getting home) is what always happens immediately after leaving the store or going home.