One June 3 newspaper report said that in a telephone interview with Health Minister Dr Fuad Khan, “he indicated he met with the ministry’s legal adviser on the Cheryl Miller case and ‘instructed the judgment be appealed’.”
High Court judge Justice Judith Jones considered that Miller would have been greatly humiliated and embarrassed by the way she was taken from her desk, taken onto the streets, and placed in an ambulance in 2012.
Miller’s humiliation was multiplied by the widespread publicity her arrest and detention at the mental hospital attracted. “The fact that calypsoes were composed and sung about her, meant that the circumstances and manner of her detention were kept in the public eye, thereby increasing and intensifying her humiliation and embarrassment,” Jones said. Jones awarded Miller general, exemplary, and aggravated damages in the sum of $835,000.
One report two days later quoted Dr Khan saying, “I told the legal department to appeal the judgment,” adding “the ministry has to utilise all options available to work with the system.” Khan is reported saying, “We believe, based on the evidence that we presented, that the mental officers, the doctors and the system were correct in their action; the other party thinks they are not.” The judge, however, found no reason to deem Miller mentally ill.
I’m uncertain what such an appeal means in law for the State. I’m confident, however, that Dr Khan could have used the country’s singularly largest mental health instance to say something more advancing and more poignant on the slowly widening discourse. I don’t believe money is the cause for the appeal, believing instead that it’s the issue of precedence in liability and culpability that has caused the NWRHA and Khan to react so fiercely.
My bewilderment deepened as Khan became the latest in a number of our country’s health ministers who, by their inaction and seeming indifference to what we are made to endure, have allowed people living with mental health issues to continue living here under an ominous cloud of suspicion and neglect.
And on the one occasion when he could have made an educated and deliberate statement to an already unsympathetic population, his action was to come out like the head honcho of health, guns blazing, who would not let any court or citizen rise in judgment of the State’s action. Maybe that is his job. Maybe his job is to protect the interest of the State against citizens, rather than to protect the State in the interest of citizens. I remain clueless about the minds of politicians. They themselves seem clueless about their own minds.
If there were to be an appeal made here, Khan should have made one for tolerance by a population that he (in a long line of health ministers) failed to educate, or to use the power/resources of his office to educate. The appeal that I was looking for is one to the population by the elected politician—whom we assume seeks the interest of his constituents, even if it’s against the State—a delicate balance that escapes politicians here too often.
It’s interesting to see to which side the discourse is/was bent, or silenced. But politicians like Khan can still gamble on the ignorance and apathy of our population to mental health. Khan can escape with such a slight because, as yet, the lobby is insufficiently powerful to cause him and his election campaign any real concern. Too many of us with mental health issues would not add/raise our voice, because each of us is concerned with hiding our status—because of the backlash such openness can have in small-minded T&T. I know. I scanned social media for reactions on the day of the judgment. There was a whole lot of support/commentary for the award of the judgment. But beyond that, the regular social media leaders—some people living with mental illnesses, too—made none of their usual learned commentary.
When I saw Miller on television, I was nervous for her and what unkind voices would say of her composure. What was said was cruel as expected. The June 3 Guardian’s editorial said, “The whole unfortunate matter only serves to highlight inadequate understanding of the fact that many tiers of intervention exist between controlling someone’s office outburst and committing them to a mental institution.” The editorial continued, “Mental health is too poorly understood and managed in T&T…In the case of Cheryl Miller, the Mental Health Act was used as a bludgeon.”
In the case of Dr Khan, mental health does not present such a national challenge for him to even pretend to be giving it an election bligh, as he’d done so carelessly, recently, in his attempt to impress the population that he was advancing the cause of health, when he said we could tape any activity at hospitals.
•Caroline C Ravello is a strategic communications professional and media practitioner with over 30 years of proficiency. She has been living/thriving with mental health issues for over 35 years.