Sofia
Content Warning: These stories are about violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and may include references to suicide or self-harming behaviours. They may contain graphic descriptions and strong language and may be distressing. Some narratives may be about First Nations people who have passed away. If you need support, please see Contact & support.
‘I was saying to them, "Mental illness is an invisible disability." They can't understand that my brain is broken. I would have thought that a government institution would be leading, but it’s so far behind.’
Sofia is in her 50s and has lived with ‘very severe mental illness’ since she was 13.
‘I’ve had multiple diagnosis,’ she told the Royal Commission. ‘I have borderline personality disorder. I think about suicide every day.’
A couple of years ago, Sofia had her ‘worst year’ as COVID restrictions made accessing support services and housing difficult.
‘My mental health was just deteriorating really badly. I was having panic attacks … I became manic for the first time in four years. I was hospitalised a couple of times because I was in such bad shape.’
Sofia had been doing housesits but ended up homeless.
‘And sleeping in my car. I slept in sheds.’
She couldn’t afford her antidepressants was often ‘a total mess’ after going without sleep for days.
At the time, she was studying a TAFE course online and asked TAFE to put strategies in place to help her.
TAFE had ‘no empathy at all’, Sofia said. She was ‘immediately shut down’.
‘There is a broad scope of reasonable adjustments that they could have implemented that would have made it very easy on them then very easy on me.’
Sofia turned to her course manager who ‘flat-out refused to talk’ to her. She kept knocking back requested changes to Sofia’s study plan.
‘She just tried to bully me … She just didn’t understand maybe how mentally ill or how bad I could get … She was just sort of throwing it back in my face and telling me that the lecturers knew what they were doing.’
Sofia said TAFE administration had no awareness about people with psychosocial disability facing homelessness. They kept pressuring her to buy things she couldn’t afford and were hostile to her.
‘They just hated me from the word go … They like isolated me … They talked about mental illness in a really, you know, ignorant way.’
Sofia had to give up her studies because of the stress.
Around the same time, she was working as a trainer for a mental health organisation – ‘teaching people with barriers to employment how to find work and stuff.’
She began to have suicidal thoughts at work.
‘And one day, I showed up and I told one of my co-workers that.’
The next day, management called her.
‘And they gave me a workplace appraisal that I failed, because I was suicidal.’
On another occasion, when she asked for help, her boss ‘shamed her further’ by calling the police.
Sofia resigned and is now unemployed.
‘The amount of discrimination that goes on within workplaces is obscene … I've developed social anxiety. I can't go to a shop now. I'm very isolated … I'm still homeless.’
Sofia is now on a disability pension and is seeing a psychiatrist once a week as she awaits the outcome of her NDIS application. She hopes this will enable her to complete her qualification.
‘For the most part, I can … I can maintain my recovery … for my illness. But trying to improve myself through studying …If I want to try again, it's going to be really hard and I'm going to have to really be in touch with my mental health network, you know, my support services.’
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.