Sliding through the safety net
Just over two years ago I left a well-paid, high-status government job to get back to the frontline and become a member of senior leadership at a school in south Auckland. The school had some extremely challenging young people on roll, did not (as is so often the case) have the resources to adequately support those young people, and less than a month into the job a very traumatised, angry young man beat me almost unconscious in front of a class full of students and staff.
This isn’t about that day. It’s not a story about the system that creates teenagers who are so traumatised, so brutalised that they lash out and put a teacher in hospital with suspected facial fractures. It’s not a memoir of the painful road to recovery out of a brain injury, the backslide into PTSD, and then out again into a new life that the me of April 2019 wouldn’t recognise. It’s about the support for this injury from the safety net New Zealand relies on. It’s about ACC.
The latter half of 2019 is at best a bit jumbled, at worst a horrifying series of jump-cuts and a montage of day after day where everything was the same and everything hurt. In the weeks after the assault, I was in contact with the school, ACC, the teacher’s union and doctors. I would have to hang up a call after ten minutes, wait for the dizziness to subside, and call back. I took copious notes that still pop up on scrap bits of paper and old notebooks to remind me of the months where my leap of faith had turned into a sickening plummet.
To begin with, ACC were not the hardest phone calls to make. The ACC form, hastily filled out by the ambulance crew on the scene, had me down as suffering “concussion and facial contusions”. ACC helped me with specialist concussion support, which helped to unspasm the muscles in my neck that had been shorted out from the rain of punches, and helped get me to a place where I felt functional. They supplied an occupational therapist, who looked at my workplace and offered some pretty good suggestions on how I could return to my job. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I couldn’t face it back there and resigned.
I instead offered myself as a relief teacher at a school I knew, and before long I was back working full time. Unfortunately, while the physical trauma had healed, the mental trauma had not. After a couple of horrifying panic attacks in the classroom I decided I couldn't continue, went on sick leave and called ACC to tell them I needed more help.
It sounds obvious, right? Teacher brutally assaulted in a classroom can’t return to the classroom, needs some support to get well. I expected that I would get the same kind of support as I had for “facial contusions and concussion”. I did not get that. I got told that as there was no mental injury listed on my original form, that I could not be supported under my original claim, and that I would have to get a diagnosis of mental injury in order to get any help.
September. I go to my GP, tearfully recounting the moments of absolute terror I’d felt in the classroom, the disgust at myself that maybe next time I’d choose to fight rather than flight or freeze and hurt someone. My GP agrees that this sounds like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, writes a letter to ACC and I hope that will be enough.
October. It’s not enough. After much pleading ACC agrees to offer me a few sessions with a psychologist, who says my case sounds like one of the clearest examples of PTSD she’s seen. She also agrees to contact ACC in support of my claim. I spend hours at home almost catatonic in despair.
November. My sick leave has run out. I can’t work, I can barely get our young child to daycare and back. I’m snappy with him at the slightest thing. I’m terrified when anything goes anywhere near my face. The concussion clinic sets me up with a neuropsychologist. She sits with me for two hours. I recount my symptoms, and she runs tests to check my brain function. She tells me that I have PTSD, and she’s worried about me. She writes a letter to ACC.
December. We ask the bank for some financial support for our mortgage while I’m unemployed. ACC say the letters from the GP and the psychologist and the neuropsychologist are insufficient evidence and I will need to see a psychiatrist. I’m told February. I’m sinking. I go on medication to try and stay afloat.
January, I manage to get a part-time job working in health promotion. Some of that work involves being in a classroom, in corrections facilities. I white knuckle it, tell my manager how I’m doing. She’s supportive and not dismissive. Slowly, the lights start to come back on.
February, I see the psychiatrist. Another two hours in a fancy office in Grey Lynn. I have to stop to get water at least twice. I remember my hand shaking, nearly crushing the cup of water as I recount, again, the terror and the darkness. That I’m not who I was, maybe never will be again. The psychiatrist tells me I have PTSD, and that he’ll write a letter to ACC. I get back in my car. Outwardly I stare at the rearview mirror while somewhere deep inside me I scream and sob and thrash at the walls.
There is a lockdown, and I am able to continue working. I make myself useful by helping make our work available online. I’m terrified that I’ll lose this job too, that the lockdowns will be like they are in other countries and will stretch on for months, years. Our little family weathers the lockdowns and the uncertainty, we spend the time rebuilding what had been torn down.
June. ACC send me a curt letter, agreeing to pay me back pay for the months I’d been off, and to refund my sick leave. After nine months, I have been diagnosed with mental injury (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
I think about how different things could have been. If we’d been renting and not been able to negotiate our repayments. If I’d not managed to get another job. If I hadn’t had a partner who managed to carry us all for so long. If I’d not entered this with a basic understanding of how government departments work, or of how to advocate for myself. If English wasn’t a language I was confident in. All of these outcomes are bleak.
We have a safety net that could be the envy of the world. Its investments make it almost self-sustaining and there is $40bn out there in those investments that mean there’s money out there to support everyone in Aotearoa who needs it. We should be able to support people like me. People like the young man who assaulted me should be able to access support long before they reach the moment where they can only think with violence. People like the ones in the mosque in Christchurch, who watched their family members die in a hail of gunfire that our government should have predicted and prevented but did not, should be able to access trauma support. Our government today decided they could not, in case other victims of trauma took that as a sign that maybe they could be cared for, too.
A safety net that cares only for physical concussions and facial contusions, but not for the mind in the brain that was damaged, is not a net at all. We can do better than this.
