Kel

Kel, in her early 40s, has bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Around five years ago she separated from her partner and in the property settlement ended up with a large sum of money.

Because of her psychosocial disability, and because her mental health was ‘quite bad at the time’, she appointed a couple she knew as her powers of attorney.

‘They were trustworthy – so I thought.’

Over the next few months, the couple spent all the money. Kel had no idea. She was receiving a Disability Support Pension and they accessed that money as well.

‘I ended up homeless … I had quite a few hospitalisations during this time for my mental health, in the private hospital, and they told me they didn't want me going to private hospitals anymore. They'd tell me that they'd cancelled, or let my health insurance lapse. There were days where I was left without food.’

The couple refused to give Kel any details about how they were managing her finances, so eventually she went to the bank to find out.

‘That's when I discovered that I had no money, that it had all been stolen,’ she said.

‘They apologised when I confronted them. They took me into their home and they convinced me at that time that I had been healed by God … of my mental illness and to come off of my medication.’

Off her meds, in a psychotic state and isolated from family and friends, it took several months for Kel to recognise she was in an abusive situation. When she did, she went to the police and asked for the powers of attorney to be reversed. They refused. It wasn’t till she went again with her mother that police agreed to take her statement.

Kel’s police statement became the basis for legal actions that followed. Kel contacted ‘every community legal centre [she] could find’ looking for support, but was rejected time after time.

‘I didn't fit into any of the support categories. I couldn't get support through any of the disability organisations because I didn't have an intellectual disability. I couldn’t get support through family violence services too easily because it wasn't the same sort of family violence. So there was a huge gap that I was falling in, left, right and centre.’

Finally, a legal clinic put in her touch with a law firm which took on her case pro bono. With their support she got nearly all her money back. She is grateful for that outcome but notes the money is, in a way, ‘the least’ of what happened to her.

‘It's all the other abuse that was associated with the money. Like, I don't have nightmares about losing money but I have nightmares about their treatment of me. I have nightmares about being left without food for days, and I have nightmares about being homeless, you know.’

Kel said her experience wasn’t caused by a lack of skills or capacity. Mostly, she said, she is ‘great’ at managing her finances.

‘This is something that'll only come up, you know, a certain percentage of the time, but at that certain percentage of the time education isn't going be able to manage it because I'm kind of crazy at that moment and I can't consequentially think … This is more a situation where the capacity is there but there are times when I don't have capacity because of the nature of my disability.’

She believes having an advocate would have made a difference, and she would like to see this kind of support offered through a system of disability ‘hubs’, similar to those established for people experiencing family violence.

‘I had to be my own advocate at a time when I was really sick … And just, you know, having somewhere where you can access that bit of extra support so someone's walking alongside you would've been amazing.’