Authored by Chidera Onyeoziri, 2018-19 AmeriCorps member

Members of the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee traveled to Baltimore, Maryland to attend the Annual Rights Conference, themed “Rights Still under Siege,” hosted by the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy, known as “NARPA.”  The conference was fortuitously scheduled during a time of great change to MHLAC’s roster; in the month of September, the Committee gained four(!) new staff, including myself. I am serving as the 2018-2019 AmeriCorps Legal Advocate. Also joining MHLAC are attorneys Matt Cregor and Laura Massie, and new attorney Coco Holbrook a N. Neal Pike Disability Rights Fellow. We were in for what would be a truly eye-opening experience, especially for me.

As a recent college graduate, I spent the last four years approaching important issues from a strictly theoretical perspective. The Law was sovereign to me. If everyday citizens might not be law-abiding, surely we can expect our most honored public servants—medical practitioners, school administrators, legislators—to be more respectful of the law. It might come as a shock to some reading this blog, but in fact public officials do not always discharge their duty in a manner that befits their office. Indeed, this conference marked my first lesson in How to Get Away with Kicking Someone While They’re Down. Put another way, the conference lent insight into the dubious and duplicitous ways in which actors in powerful institutions ignore, circumvent, and blatantly disobey The Law.

Each day at the conference consisted of a Keynote address, followed by a series of highly informative and interactive workshops on a range of issues related to disability rights, and concluded with a plenary address, Working Group Meeting, and exclusive film screening. Each workshop I attended was more illuminating than the next. To give a better sense of the type of workshops offered, here were my top three: 1) The Maryland Suspension Representation Project: Using Legal Action to Address Inappropriate Use of School Discipline for Students with Disabilities, 2) Discriminatory Policing: Harm Reduction Means Hands Off, 3) The First Cause of Everything Bad in the Mental Health System: Psychiatric Diagnosis Action Think Tank, and 4) The New Prisons: The Use of Psychiatric Confinement and Outpatient Commitment Orders as Punishment. I threw in a fourth workshop for fun. But these topics were no laughing matter. As a newcomer to disability law, the workshops were a daily assault on my sensibilities.

My interest in the Maryland Suspension Representation Project stemmed from its similarity to MHLAC’s line of work. The project is a partnership between legal aid organizations in Maryland and the Youth Education and Justice Clinic at Carey School of Law that provides legal representation to students with disabilities facing disciplinary exclusion practices. For me this workshop was helpful in describing the mechanism by which the school to prison pipeline functions: school disciplinary processes now intersect with the juvenile justice system through the presence of school resource officers. Public officials insidiously militarize schools by increasing the presence of police officers and encouraging officers to arrest children for school policy violations; the presence of officers in schools—particularly in urban schools with predominantly minority populations—facilitates unrelenting government surveillance on black and brown bodies.

The First Cause of Everything Bad and the New Prisons workshops were useful in revealing the interconnection between mental health and social context. Mental health professionals typically diagnose clients without regard to their life experiences. Anything can be recommended in the name of treatment when psychiatric diagnoses are assigned. This is particularly alarming given that the standard of care in the mental health system is forced commitment, forced medication, and overmedication, all of which significantly decrease life span by twenty five years on average. We considered how mental health standard of care effects children in foster care who are overrepresented in the psychiatric system and notoriously overmedicated.

Children in foster care typically experience troubled childhoods that include histories of sexual molestation, physical assault, emotional abuse and neglect, all in addition to poverty and likely drug use in the home. It is understandable and even expected that these traumatic experiences can cause serious psychological harm. When psychiatrists diagnose without considering children’s troubled lives, issues of misdiagnosis and overmedication arise.

Trauma-informed treatment should be standard practice in the provision of psychiatric and social services. In the context of mental health, the idea of trauma-informed services is the theory of intersectionality in practice. That is, providing trauma-informed services is to understand how the interconnection between diverging social categories such as race, class, gender, and disability create particular systems of discrimination and disadvantage and then consider how experiences of discrimination and disadvantage may affect the receipt of services. For example, DYS social workers in determining services for low income, minority youthful offenders with history of family abuse and truancy may take into account that talk therapy may not only be re-traumatizing but also that these youth may be especially unable to develop trusting relationships with white, middle-class psychiatrists. In the absence of a trauma-informed standard of care, health professionals work with law enforcement to diagnose mental illness, utilizing asylums and outpatient commitment orders as means to medically incarcerate, indeterminately surveil, control, and impose punishment without conviction.

On its face, the Law exists to maintain order. Maintaining order requires forms of social acceptance and control. In a society with a troubling–to say the least–record on issues of race and mental health, I daresay we should almost expect injustices to arise along these fault lines, which leads me to question the reverence I once accorded to the law. My work at MHLAC has taught me that legal advocates are the enforcement mechanisms Legal aid lawyers keep public officials accountable to people whose rights are violated. For instance, I am reaching out to Family Resource Centers to learn about student experiences with school police this school year as part of MHLAC’s efforts to monitor the implementation of the recently passed Criminal Justice Reform Act. In effect, what I am learning is that where there is Law there will always be need for lawyers, particularly, legal aid attorneys.