Seamus

‘They allowed me to run out of funding three times. They said they wouldn’t, but they did.’

Seamus is in his late 60s and lives with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to childhood sexual abuse. About a decade ago, he started to develop symptoms of functional neurological disorder (FND) as a result of military service in Vietnam.

‘My PTSD existed before Vietnam. Vietnam just added to the trauma,’ Seamus told the Royal Commission. ‘Unfortunately, because of my childhood and the institutional abuse that I copped and my family, I figured … in lots of ways, Vietnam was going to be a suicide mission for me.’

Seamus said FND, which is only just ‘starting to be recognised properly’, has left him in a wheelchair. He’s had most of the typical symptoms such as seizures, becoming non-verbal and limbs that ‘don’t work’. Sometimes he’ll ‘disassociate and shut down’.

‘If you’ve got trauma, you’re more predisposed … What it means is, the hardware and the software of your brain doesn’t connect. And this is why I’m no longer walking. This is why I often lock up … I haven’t walked for three years at all, despite every attempt under the sun.’

Seamus had been on the NDIS for a few years. As he went ‘from being able to walk … to needing mobility aids’, he needed more support. But the NDIS failed to help.

‘The more our needs increase, the less money they give us.’

Because his condition ‘wasn’t identified in the very beginning … it’s a battle,’ Seamus said.

‘When I first went into it, they just put it down as my PTSD and my acquired brain injury. Every time something else comes along … you’ve got to bow to them to include that.’

He blames ‘misconceptions’ about FND for that, which held more sway than reports from his occupational therapist.

‘She’s had to put report after report saying the same thing, because they choose not to accept those reports but rely on reports that were written more than two years ago that simply weren’t even factual … They still consider that we’re either liars or crazy.’

This led to Seamus being without a wheelchair when he needed one.

‘I was struggling, struggling because I had no money. I didn’t even have money to hire a wheelchair … and having the people who pay my bills searching through Google to buy one. This is wrong. This is so wrong.’

Seamus ended up being ‘virtually homeless in a wheelchair for the best part of two years’. During COVID lockdowns, he lived precariously, sleeping in ‘probably 60 different places’. After being evicted from one accommodation ‘without notice’, he lodged a complaint with the NDIA.

‘They allowed me to sleep in a public toilet for a week at one stage. They allowed me to sleep in my storage unit at one stage … And, so, I fled in my van and moved sites in caravan parks … I don't know how many places I’ve been in over two years, but thankfully all that’s over.’

Seamus said he would still be homeless today if a federal politician hadn’t intervened on his behalf.

‘Now, I’ve got my own little department housing complex. But it wasn’t the NDIS that helped me get what I needed.’

With the help of an advocate, he recently appealed the NDIS decision at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and won. Today he has 70 hours of support a week and a new wheelchair, but is still concerned about the future.

‘They said they’d come up with a good plan for one year and then we would look at it again … I know full well if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have got in under my PTSD back then, then right now I’d be in big trouble.’