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ILLNESS AND WHISTLEBLOWING

Chris Clode

Having sat through a two day Remedies Hearing supporting a Freedom to Care Member (in 2004) who was dismissed for whistleblowing, it is clear that the arguments whether health or psychiatric harm have been caused stem from a real misunderstanding of the internal processes a whistleblower goes through.

The debate between the psychiatrists called by the two sides centred on whether the whistleblower was well or not; it was argued that the fact that he could stand up in the Tribunal and reel off all the detail and dates of his case proved that he was well. Those of us who regularly work with whistleblowers will know that it is exactly the opposite that is true. It is the fact that the whistleblower has his mind so filled with all the detail of his/her defence that is the symptom of the illness caused by the situation in which they find themselves. I term the illness Whistleblower obsessive pedantry syndrome; it is what makes the whistleblower such a powerful opposition to organisational malpractice - grasping events and dates spontaneously out of the air, even when faced with the massed ranks of barristers and solicitors and their trolley loads of files, that a big organisation can mass against him/her.

But the obsessive command of detail has its costs. A mind filled with the minutiae of the case is a mind with room for nothing else - often no space left for family, friends (often driven off by the continual return of conversation to that case again) nor for sustaining alternative employment. And, all the eggs of their life in one basket, these whistleblowers are totally dependent for their mood on the unpredictable events of the Disciplinary/Tribunal/Court process they can seldom exert much power over, with its long adjournments, often with spiralling costs for distrustful legal representatives.

What sort of justice is it that requires the advocate for ethical behaviour in an organisation, to have to prove that they are mad, anyway? Or does that actually say something unintentionally deep about the craven immorality of the society and times in which we live? Wedding the upholding of ethics to a diagnosis of psychiatric illness.

FtC 2005