Law Times

Law Times • sepTember 15, 2014 Page 7 www.lawtimesnews.com COMMENT Choir of voices needed to tackle depression in legal profession and beyond By roBert KoMinar For Law Times am a lawyer and I suffer from depression. I have pondered writing something like this for years. I wrote about depression some 20 years ago for the Law Society Gazette. I believed those words could make some difference in the way society treated people, particularly lawyers, who endured serious depression. I was naive. I became only a curiosity in a legal carnival of professional anomalies and problematic characters. The feedback from that article was on the lines of: "Sorry to hear about your aff lictions, but they don't apply to me." Lawyers, other than me apparently, had some im- munity from mental illness. Stereotypically, such invin- cibility is supposedly a good trait to have in what largely remains an adversarial legal culture. Robin Williams was a celebrity; yet he took his life. To many, this act is incomprehensible. They wonder why no- tables take such extreme actions when their social status opens access to some of life's greatest possibilities. Others wonder why the revelation of depression in prominent people stimulates so much public interest in mental- health conditions and outcomes. We have long known these conditions aff lict many ordinary people. The best current estimate is that one in five Canadians will at some time suffer from a diagnosable mental illness. But Williams' death has now worked its way through the standard news cycles. Journalism dealing with de- pression and mental health has started to fade into the background of our awareness. A notable exception is the story about the struggles of Orlando Da Silva, the new president of the Ontario Bar Association. There is a disparity between our responses to men- tal and physical health even though our worldview has long rejected a Cartesian separation of matter and mind. Whatever human consciousness is, it emerges from the brain. The brain is a biochemical organ, just as the heart and the lungs are, differing only in its organizational complexity. But many people, including lawyers, still respond to the appearance of mental-health issues as though they originate in some ghostly realm. Restorative approaches to including people who have experienced depression or other mental-health issues back into the community are not yet widely available. Consider how challenging it can be to locate a residence for mentally ill people in most neighbourhoods. We must aim for a parity of esteem for those who ex- perience mental-health challenges and those who expe- rience physical illness. But this parity must extend well beyond funding primary medical and limited psycho- logical care for sufferers. Depression is not simply a medical condition. Its reach extends far beyond the limits of pharmaceutical, psycho- therapeutic, and other interventions medical science can offer. The efforts of the health-care system are extremely important. They can relieve acute distress and pull peo- ple back from the abyss. However, they often only pull a depressed person back to the precipice of hopelessness. This remains a very dangerous place. Moving back from that ledge calls for a more relational approach. The whole community must participate in rehabili- tation after a disabling depression. People with mental- health challenges should not have to force or earn their way back into the world. Society still treats experiencing a mental-health challenge as a moral failure. Many lawyers suffer heart attacks but they never have to battle to return to work. Perversely, the legal profession often regards heart attacks as badges of honour and a sign of a dedica- tion to work beyond the call of duty. I have lived with depression, anxiety, and, as I have recently learned, an atypical form of bipolar disorder for decades. As a result, I have lived a life of ongoing scrutiny and indefinite probation. Most people believe depression is totally disabling. Depression is often paralytic but not always so. It is often possible to manage it with good care. Many physical illnesses and diseases now claim their public voices. Cancer speaks openly and assertively, as do diabetes and heart disease. Mental illness faces unique challenges in doing the same as it often silences voices. We need others to make its voice heard. Soci- ety should not view this as a burden. Social dialogue is not the forum for privileged individual preferences. To work well, it requires the inclusion of a multitude of voices. When mental illness renders voices absent or faint, the moral responsibility on the rest of us is to seek them out and then openly listen to and amplify them. I suffered a heart attack shortly after my first signifi- cant encounter with depression. The physical pain of a heart attack is intense, frightening, and acute. The thresh- old of death is right in front of you. Depression's pain is chronic, corrosive, and ultimately more harmful. Loved ones and caregivers bear witness to the caustic effects of depressive experience as their charges progressively with- draw from normal forms of life. For those with no access to loving people, depression petrifies inner experience and makes it more difficult to excavate a healthy life. Stigma related to depression inf licts even more pro- found and chronic pain. It replicates and intensifies per- sonal suffering and spreads it to the public world. Stigma has no shame. It treats the depressed as though they are functionally dead. They are things, not people. We do not even attempt to communicate with things. After my first instance of serious depression, I agreed with the Law Society of Upper Canada not to practise law for a time as a sole practitioner. This was a good and pragmatic idea at the time. It was important for me not to be alone then. I needed a job. The story about Da Silva is serendipi- tous. The local Crown attorney, whom I knew well, asked me if I wanted to work for him. He knew the whole his- tory of my health. I appreciated the opportunity. I had to do an interview at the Crown law office in Toronto. When I interviewed with a young lawyer, she noted she had a friend who had also suffered from depression and one day fell down crying onto a courtroom f loor. She told me the Crown, the representative of the people, could not have such people working for it. She declined to approve me. When I advised the Crown who had offered me the position about this response, he suggested I request a review from her supervisor. That individual declined to meet me or even review my application. When I inquired about what I could do next, the advice was to not com- plain further if I ever wanted a job in the government. This was my harsh introduction to stigma. The govern- ment that had passed and enforced human rights laws was infused with it. It is gratifying to learn that the Minis- try of the Attorney General is not quite so ignorant about mental health any longer. Stigma layers new suffering upon already-exist- ing pain. It judges that the depressed warrant public humiliation. It seeks to drive them back down into their inner experiences and prevent them from re- emerging into the community. I experienced another bout of challenging depres- sion about a year ago. Depression can be cyclic, psychia- trists advise me. My work environment became chal- lenging. I eventually requested accommodations under the Human Rights Code. I took this step reluctantly as two supervisors had advised me that I would only encounter adversarial resistance from the employer. Their prophecies were correct. My employer declined to implement all but one of the accommodations my treating health-care practitioner had recommended. I eventually had to leave that employment. Most recently, the same employer refused to approve me for a position with the private organization to which it has contracted out a large portion of its work, notwithstanding that I met all criteria for the job other than government ratifi- cation. Exclusion's radius always increases. Stigma spreads easily because it is not constrained by facts or attention to fairness. After leaving govern- ment work, vague rumours about my mental health began circulating within the legal world I had known. When I applied for new employment, even at firms where lawyers had invited me to work in the past, I re- ceived no response. There was no overt rejection, just the alienating cruelty and isolation of absolute silence. Two legal recruiters recently declined to pass my re- sume to their clients based on my mental-health status. One recruiter advised me that a reason for his decision was he thought an epigram on my letterhead ref lected mental immaturity. I actually like that epigram and have had many compliments on it. It was from Dr. Seuss. I doubt the clients of such recruiters hear or care about the people filtered out under the guise of due dili- gence. If law firms choose to be wilfully blind, they are complicit in the stigmatization their agents practice. The law society has recently integrated a member services plan that includes short-term and crisis inter- ventions for lawyers, including those with mental-health concerns. Although such programs can help, they cannot replace the peer-to-peer program it used to support. That program helped walk people back from the precipice through ongoing and caring support. The outgoing lieutenant-governor of Ontario, David Onley, has spoken of the waste of human energy and talent that discrimination against all forms of disability generates. This waste is a public creation. By isolating and failing to actively accommodate, we harm not only those targeted by the stigma we toler- ate but also our communities and professions. Onley is right in advocating for a paradigm shift away from focusing on the challenges of those with both physical and mental disabilities to a worldview that acknow- ledges, values, and engages the strengths of everyone. Even though I have described some of my personal ex- perience with depression, my challenges are not unique. Even though many others have recently and eloquently written about depression, suicide, and mental health, it is critical that more people contribute their voices to the dialogue. No matter how poignant or tragic any individ- ual story of depression may be, it will only be a choir of voices that will bring about change. LT uRobert Kominar is a lawyer based in Hamilton, Ont. u SPEAKER'S CORNER FIX IS IN FOR ISRAEL It may usually be appropriate for us to jump on the bandwagon when a fellow Canadian lawyer receives an internation- al posting, but this should not be the case in the appointment of William Schabas as lead investigator by the United Nations Human Rights Council. In the Aug. 18 edition of Law Times, col- umnist Richard Cleroux makes no men- tion of the history of the UN council where many nations with some of the worst hu- man rights records monopolize its time by routinely and persistently condemning Israel, the only true democracy in a region where no country affords women and gays more rights and where there is no greater adherence to the rule of law or a free press. In addition to the mention by Cleroux of the past comment by Schabas that Is- raeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should "probably be in the dock of an inter- national court," he could have also added, in an incredible twist on the notion of propor- tionality, that Schabas also drew a parallel between the genocidal murder of hundreds of thousands of people by the Sudanese government and Israel's conduct when he asked, "Why are we going after the president of Sudan for Darfur and not the president of Israel for Gaza?" Let us also be clear that Schabas accepted his appointment to lead a panel that is not charged with determining whether viola- tions of international law were committed in the Gaza Strip but to document the crimes perpetrated by Israel. There is no apparent mandate for Schabas to investigate Hamas' involvement in the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers, the initiation of hostilities, the targeting of Israeli civilians by missiles and tunnels, the use of UN sites to house arms, the breaking of numerous ceasefires, and the use of civilian shields. Even if Schabas had chosen to disown his past comments, certainly the very appear- ance of a predetermined verdict should have necessitated his refusal to accept this position. We should not be pleased with this appointment but disappointed that Schabas would accept such a role from a politically motivated council with an all-too-apparent agenda. As indicated in the New York Daily News on Aug. 31, "the fix is in." Carl Zeliger, Wisebrod/Zeliger Associates, Toronto I u Letter to the editor

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