Prejudice and ignorance kept me in the closet professionally and personally.
Helen Morrison holds her grandson in Victoria in 2020.This First Person article is the experience of Helen Morrison, a retired lawyer in Victoria. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please seeIn squabbles with my siblings, we would casually toss out insults like "you're crazy" or "you're a psycho." None of us actually knew anything about mental illness but we had the notion that people put in "loony bins" were misfits and outcasts.
I internalized my prejudice and ignorance, and my self-esteem plummeted. I literally hung my head in shame. And the guilt and shame were reinforced when I was warned not to talk about it by my psychiatrist. It would be career-limiting if it became widely known by colleagues in my workplace. And if my ex-husband found out, I could lose custody of our five-year-old daughter. Both were scary prospects.
Admission would be a long uphill battle for someone like me and I wasn't up for the fight. Thankfully, in 2009, an articling student with depression challenged the Law Society and the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal found the questionAs a result, the Law Society reformulated the question to focus on the likelihood of an existing condition impairing the ability to function as a lawyer or articled student.
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