People with psychosocial disability from mental illness will lose out from tightened NDIS eligibility

Australia's Senate is expected to vote this week on legislation tightening access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and per Lisa Grech at Deakin University, people with psychosocial disabilities from mental illness will be hit hardest. The bill requires applicants to prove permanent disability and exhaustion of all publicly funded treatments—a near-impossible bar for conditions like schizophrenia and major depression, which fluctuate and lack simple cures. Today, just one in four applicants with psychosocial disability are approved, down from nearly two-thirds five years ago. Grech notes that even schizophrenia, without a cure, has been rejected as insufficiently permanent, and therapy is scarce: Medicare covers only ten sessions yearly. The bill also risks removing the appeal pathway through which seventy-six percent of rejected NDIS decisions were overturned.

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