my past work experience at Legal Aid - part 9

Wednesday 25-9-2002

I was looking forward to going to the Mental Health Hospital with the duty lawyer today but I was careful not to expect too much after all the disappointments I’ve endured in previous weeks when my expectations were set too high. The duty lawyer told me beforehand that we only had to see seven clients and that things were going to be pretty dry and routine. On the way there, I gathered that the Mental Health Tribunal operated more like an inquisitorial legal system rather than an adversarial one. Once we were out there, I was shocked to find that the so-called "hospital" didn’t look anything like the average hospital at all! The duty lawyer had two two-inch thick files for a doctor to read. I wonder how many pages the doctor will actually read or skim read! The officers behind the counter were going to give us both a duress alarm but the duty lawyer told them that we don’t usually use them because we weren’t taught how to operate them. Instead, we have a guard seat with us in the interview room. I thought that was a bit strange, I mean, if people like us can’t use the duress alarms, then who can and more specifically, who were the duress alarms made for! I also thought that the officers behind the counter were a bit slow. Things we tell them in plain English seem to take yonks before they register. Later, while we were waiting to be led through the hospital, the duty lawyer told me that he sometimes can’t figure out the difference between his clients and those who work behind the counters!

The interviews themselves weren’t that interesting at all because basically, we couldn’t give our clients any advice nor were there any instructions to take as everything is dependent on their respective psychiatrist’s assessment report, which we didn’t yet have. As a result, these meetings were rather short and unproductive. In fact, we finished so quickly that we made it back to the office before 12:30pm! Getting back to the interviews, the first client offered me his hand and I, probably as an automatic response, offered him my hand. Then, all of a sudden, I remembered what the unit co-ordinator had said during orientation about shaking the hands of the mentally ill! He said that when people have got voices in their head 24/7, they are not going to worry too much about their personal hygiene. He also said that many have hepatitis C. Gee was I worried but then I saw the duty lawyer shook his hand as well so that calmed me a little. I asked the duty lawyer immediately about shaking his mentally ill clients’ hands and he said that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it and that as yet, he had not caught any disease from shaking their hands. In fact, I think the duty lawyer thought that I was the weird one, to be asking him the question in the first place! He even joked about it when we got back to the office! Anyway, from the second interview onwards, I became increasingly conscious of our clients’ hands. I noticed that none of them were clean and that some even had blisters on them! Nonetheless, I still ended up shaking every hand that was offered to me (a total of six) mainly because I didn’t know how I was supposed to tell them that I didn’t want to shake their hands! Overall, I thought that our clients really weren’t that mental but the duty lawyer said that he’s seen marked improvements in most of his clients’ conditions since he first saw them. I also noticed that some of our clients had slurred speech and the duty lawyer explained that this was caused by the junk (medication) that these people are forced to take. By far I thought that the most interesting client we had was one who wanted Legal Aid to help him sue his psychiatrist because he thought that he was not mentally ill and that his psychiatrist got it wrong. The duty lawyer told him to get a private lawyer because Legal Aid couldn’t help him as public funding is not provided for civil law suits.