How one woman’s eight-year fight raises questions about ACC’s ‘abhorrent’ new approach to weekly compensation

Eight years after she first sought help, Kristy Wilson has finally won weekly compensation for the childhood sexual abuse she suffered. But her case has highlighted a disputed new ACC approach that denies some survivors the payment – because ACC says they suffered their mental injury before they were earning an income.

On a Monday in late March 2018, 36-year-old Kristy Wilson finally broke.

She’d been stressed and anxious for months, under pressure supporting her husband’s new business while also working fulltime.

“This big giant bomb exploded,” Wilson says. “And it was me.”

She saw her GP who wrote in his notes that she was in a hole she felt she couldn’t escape, to the point where she had a “passive death wish”. She said she would not follow through with it because of her children.

The doctor prescribed medication to help her sleep, and Wilson went to counselling. At her third session, she disclosed significant childhood sexual abuse. For more than 30 years, she had told no one.

Wilson was referred to a psychologist under ACC’s sensitive claims process for funded counselling, a “daunting” process which opened the Pandora’s box she’d kept locked for so long.

Thirty years of silence

Wilson was born in New Zealand and moved with her grandmother to the Australian outback when she was 2 years old.

From the age of 8, she says she was sexually abused by a family member.

She returned to New Zealand just before she turned 15 and the abuse continued for another two years. There were also separate incidents of sexual abuse when she was 15 and 16, recorded in psychiatric and psychological reports.

Three weeks after that first appointment with her doctor, stressed and overwhelmed, Wilson resigned from her job. It was the 17th of April – a date that would turn out to be significant.

In October that year, experiencing suicidal thoughts, Wilson went to the hospital emergency department and was referred to Mental Health Services. She was diagnosed with depression and PTSD.

But in the first setback of what would turn out to be an eight year battle with ACC, she was told that because the abuse did not happen in New Zealand, ACC could not grant cover for mental injury.

Wilson says she was left far worse off than before she had sought help.

“I don’t even know how to explain that moment,” she told Stuff at her home in the Waikato town of Huntly. “I went into a very deep depression. Life just went spiraling.”

She began “self-sabotaging,” abusing substances and alcohol. She wondered how she would pay for the treatment she felt she desperately needed. Her suicidal thoughts became suicide attempts.

But with a daughter and two stepdaughters – “so much to live for” – in 2023, Wilson found an organisation that advocates for ACC claimants, which connected her with specialist ACC firm John Miller Law.

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