Spending twelve hours a day playing video games might sound like a dream for some teenagers, but for one Canberran, it was the isolating result of NDIS failures. After churning through support worker after support worker who didn't know how to care for a young neurodiverse adult, Will Golding showed me how he took treating his disability into his own hands—literally.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00They're laughing now, but many of the gamers in this room have a lonely origin story.
00:10We had a client here who now, at the time he was gaming about 13 hours, 14 hours a day
00:18straight, to the point where sometimes his muscles have actually atrophied.
00:23At one point, Will was racking up 12 hours a day himself, kept behind a screen, despite
00:29paying for NDIS support workers who advertised themselves as helping young neurodiverse adults
00:35become more social.
00:37Unqualified, very young, didn't really know much about autism or mental health problems,
00:43didn't know what was out there, didn't understand how the NDIS worked.
00:48You start to lose a lot of the communication skills, especially if you're talking to someone
00:52behind the screen.
00:53Will lives with 47XYY syndrome, which manifests similarly to autism, but his once waning
01:00social skills have dramatically turned around since starting Ignition, where people game
01:05in person.
01:08They can understand if someone's frustrated, they can understand if someone's sad, they
01:11can understand if someone's happy, because they can see their facial expressions from
01:14that.
01:15There's a lot of emotional connection bonding throughout the whole thing.
01:19There's a number of boys who would come with a phone or an iPad in front of them and headphones
01:25on and don't talk to me, and then they get in there and you can see them defrost.
01:30So much of what makes support quality is that human connection is working well together,
01:35so when providers aren't taking that into consideration, people are then not receiving
01:40the support that they need.
01:42Experts say many participants feel let down by the quality of some support workers.
01:47These are people that we're talking about, these are members of society, they are not
01:50a commodity, it's not a way to make money, it's not how it should be seen.
01:55And it's not an add-on or a luxury to go and meet people in a social setting.
02:01Some of Ignition's participants now have jobs, and they're getting comfortable being uncomfortable.
02:06They're also becoming a lot more outgoing, so after every Friday we'll go to the pub
02:12just over the road.
02:13All barriers have gone, they're just in their element.
02:16A simple activity, but such a relief.