Ontario Court of Justice Patrice Band discusses trauma in the courtroom and his decision in R. v. Marratt which is the first of its kind to comment on vicarious trauma in the courtroom in the context of cp cases. This episode is Justice Band's call for everyone in the legal profession to learn more about trauma, its impacts on all of us and to explore how we can reduce its frequency.
Ontario Court of Justice Patrice Band discusses trauma in the courtroom and his decision in R. v. Marratt which is the first of its kind to comment on vicarious trauma in the courtroom in the context of CP cases. This episode is Justice Band's call for everyone in the legal profession to learn more about trauma, its impacts on all of us and to explore how we can reduce its frequency. If you have a Chief Judge or Justice in your life or a Minster of Justice, please share this episode with them. May we all, one day soon, see a trauma-informed courtroom in Canada.
Myrna McCallum:
I'm Myrna McCallum, Metis-Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of trauma-informed lawyering. Welcome back to The Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast season two, folks. As you know, I believe that law schools and bar courses are missing a critical competency requirement in their curriculum, trauma-informed lawyering. Becoming a trauma-informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs, and biases, call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy, guide your practice to avoid doing further harm to others, and ask that you commit to remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn't know you needed before beginning your career. Your education starts right here, right now. Transcripts for season two have been generously sponsored by the BC Law Foundation.
Welcome back to another episode of The Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast. I want to start off saying a huge thank you to everyone who reached out to me after the last episode. I was tired, right. You could hear it. Folks have been fantastic. I really appreciate the comments, the support, the messages, all of it. Thank you so much. It's clear to me that a lot of folks value this podcast and want to see it live on for a long time still. I'm just incredibly humbled and in awe of who this podcast reaches. It's so cool. If you like what you hear today, I just want to remind you, please head over to ko-fi.com. That's K-O-F-I.com/thetraumainformedlawyer and leave me a tip, like cash tip, not a, "Oh, hey, Myrna, here's something you could do about your vocal fry," not that kind of tip. Yeah, head on over there. Leave me a tip if you love what you hear. This way I can keep this podcast, if it continues, ad free, which I'm sure you and I would both appreciate.
I want to just acknowledge, or I just want to share that I am running the Trauma-Informed Justice Course again, the one that I did in July was so incredibly successful. I had such overwhelming positive feedback, so I decided to run it a second time. I'm running it from November 21st to 23rd. I have also included a non-profit rate so more folks could have access to it. I also set aside 10 scholarships for law students. I think most of them are gone already. There might be one or two left. If you're interested, send me an email, find me on social media. I'm easy to locate. Let me know if you're a law student and you're interested in taking the course.
It's going to be delivered again online via Zoom events. So, all the sessions will be recorded and folks who have registered will have access for a period of time to watch the recordings following the course. So, if you're interested, find me on social media for more information or go to my website, myrnamccallum.co, It's currently under, I think, renovations or whatever you call that. So, you should see some updates on my website soon. Okay. With that, I think we're going to get started with today's episode, which, by the way, really inspires me and reminds me how I would love to see a trauma-informed courtroom in this country. Justice Pat Band is one of my favorites and I really hope you enjoy today's conversation.
So, today we have a treat, my listeners have a treat. We have Justice Patrice Band with us, who I'm going to affectionately refer to as Pat, today. I'm so excited because folks who've been a long time listeners of this podcast know that I have been fangirling over this judge for a long time, ever since I stumbled across his decision in a child pornography case, where he talked about vicarious trauma in the courtroom and he said that we need to learn more about it, we need to talk about it. I was like, "Yes, we need more of this." As destiny would have it, somehow the stars aligned and I got to meet this fantastic human being. So, welcome, Pat, to The Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast.
Patrice Band:
Thanks very much. I'm so happy to be here. I'm also a fanboy of yours and have been for a long time and I'm really excited that you're taking a lead on these issues, because really someone had to with a voice like yours. So, thanks for having me.
Myrna McCallum:
You're a judge in Ontario. Tell us a little bit about where you sit and how long you've been in that role.
Patrice Band:
I'm a judge on the Ontario Court of Justice, which is a court that is based in the province, we're appointed by the provincial government and there are similar courts in every province in Canada. The territories can be a bit different. But our jurisdiction is limited, essentially, well, certainly, in Ontario to criminal matters, anything short of murder, and a couple of other things, terrorism and piracy, I think. So, some of the more obscure ones we don't do. We also have a family law jurisdiction. So, I happen to do only criminal law, I do that at the courthouse in Toronto called Old City Hall. Before that, I was a judge in the Brampton Courthouse in Peel Region and I've been a judge since 2013.
Myrna McCallum:
2013. Okay. So, were you a criminal defense lawyer before that?
Patrice Band:
Yes. Immediately, before I was appointed, I had my own criminal defense practice. I shared space with other lawyers. Prior to that, I was an assistant crown attorney in Downtown, Toronto. Between those two things, those two gigs, I spent a short time as a prosecutor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, where most of my job was prosecuting physicians for professional misconduct.
Myrna McCallum:
Talk a little bit about how you came to understand trauma.
Patrice Band:
Well, I'm sort of embarrassed to say I started to think about it way too late. I sort of came at it backwards and maybe that's the way it is with people and trauma, particularly, with their own lived experience. But professionally, I look back and think that I was very slow on the uptake. I really had to be bopped on the head by it. Things came up organically that way. Then looking back on my career and my life, I could see some really important points, pressure points, if you want to put it that way, that have accumulated during my life as my personal life and my career.
What I mean by coming at it backwards is that, and you referenced one of the decisions that I wrote, it came up, I got bumped on the head by it twice in a row. Of course, it wasn't until the second time that the light came on when a member of the court staff broke down during the reading in of the allegations in two different child pornography cases. We hadn't viewed any material or even listened to any audio and it was the crown attorney reading in the descriptions of the material.
The first time I was aware of the problem that one of my staff had, but she got herself quietly subbed out over the lunch break, so that was seamless. Then the second time it was much more apparent and I had to do something about it. Thank goodness the crown attorney pointed it out to me, because I couldn't see the person from where I sat. It was on that second time that I really realized we have to do something about the exposure that we in the criminal justice system and in the justice system at large face on a day in and day out basis of traumatic material or potentially traumatizing material sort of without warning, without any tools at our disposal to anticipate it or to deal with it after the fact. That's what I mean by backwards. That's when a light bulb really came on. Then I started to ask myself a lot of questions about trauma for which I have very few answers, but I know we can do better.
Myrna McCallum:
I'm going to just read a little bit from that Marratt decision, which is where I stumbled across learning about you. You had referenced a previous decision that you wrote called Shaw, and in that you said, again, in Marratt, "In my experience in the criminal courts, child pornography involves traumatizing imagery that can affect even those of us who believe we are thick-skinned or that we have seen it all. The effects can be serious and lasting. They can, in combination with others, have serious impacts on our mental and physical health in our relationships. In our profession and others, direct and vicarious trauma are topics that are rightly becoming the topic of study and discussion. This discussion must continue."
Mind-blowing, I never heard that before come from a judge and I have been, as a prosecutor, I've been in many situations where I myself am trying to hold it together as I'm addressing the court or trying very hard not to express whatever's happening internally, for me, particularly in cases where I have had to deal with the abuse of children. Are you finding that in order to do this job that there's this idea that we have to be thick-skinned?
Patrice Band:
Well, I think there's a trope of the thick-skinned criminal lawyer, crown attorney, criminal judge. I think it's some sort of thing that we all buy into and in some ways we almost take some strange pride in it. "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," that sort of thing. I don't say that pointing the finger. I mean, I would've worn a T-shirt that said, "I'm thick-skinned," 15 years ago when I would've worn it with pride. But I didn't understand that inherent in that concept I think is this false idea that we can compartmentalize our profession, what we see and hear in our profession from the core of who we are. I think that idea needs to be dismantled, that the person in the role can't be separated in airtight containers.
Again, very slow on the uptake. These things started to fall into place for me. I also think we tend to, because what we're exposed to can be small doses at high frequency, we tend to downplay their effect, because we don't necessarily perceive the cumulative effect which can be slower, I think. I remember when I was a baby crown at one of our conferences, Roméo Dallaire spoke, who had been in Rwanda as you know, and had written a very compelling book about it. So, he spoke about post-traumatic stress disorder and, at some point as well, Justice LeSage, who had been on the Bernardo trial, spoke quite a bit about this.
I think it was easy for me at the time to think, "Well, I'm not in a war-torn country where genocide is taking place and I'm not viewing the Bernardo tapes. That's what happens to bigger, better people, not to people like me." So, it's that cumulative impact of it I think that I started to learn about through introspection and research. That's one of the things that I became very moved by is just trying to debunk some of those myths for myself only, for starters, to understand what was going on in my mind and also in our profession, because I think it's unhealthy and unsustainable.
Myrna McCallum:
I think that you just said something really important in that we experience traumatic events in our own way. It's an individual experience. You and I can watch a horrific motor vehicle accident occur right before our eyes and you could walk away and go, "Wow, I hope those people are okay," and then get on with your day. And I could stand there and be completely immobilized. I think we have to understand that we don't all experience things the very same way and that doesn't invalidate it, minimize it, it just is what it is.
I find, when we listen to people who bring their trauma or their traumatic experience to our door, they will tell us whether an event that they experienced was traumatic for them or if it wasn't. Because there are some people who show up and we think, "This individual ought to be traumatized," and they're not or they appear not to be. That may just be the case. I think we all have to, as humanity, we have to practice a little self-compassion and recognize that we all experience things in the world very differently from each other and that needs to just be the accepted norm. Tell me why you went on to write about how this conversation needs more discussion, more research?
Patrice Band:
I believe that our profession is way behind the times on this, when you compare it to some of the other professions and occupations that we immediately endorse as being front-liners. I don't detract from that notion, but they're way ahead of us. I think, I don't know why, perhaps because it's the small doses at higher frequency rather than cataclysmic events that we witness as part of our job regularly. Maybe we've just been too passive about it or slow to learn about it. But I think, in some ways, we are first-liners, we're first-liners on other people's trauma all the time. We often say without necessarily reflecting on it that we see people having one of the worst days of their lives or reliving one of the worst days of their lives on a regular basis. That kind of trauma I believe radiates from those people and penetrates us and stays with us.
Myrna McCallum:
Absolutely. I was talking to a group of people not that long ago, who work in a criminal courtroom or criminal justice setting, and one of the things I said to them was to do this little visualization exercise. I said, "Imagine for a moment everybody who comes into your workplace, into that space that you occupy, brings a traumatic experience that they're going to share with you, they're going to expose you to. When they leave, they leave a little mark on you, whether for our purposes, let's think of it as a sticky note. They put a sticky note on you and then they leave. Then the other person comes in, puts a sticky note on you, leaves. All those sticky notes are these traumas of theirs that they've shared."
I said, "How many sticky notes would you have on you right now if that was the case?" Some people said, "I wouldn't even be able to open my eyes. I would be so covered with all of these stories." I said, "Okay, knowing this, that people will leave that with us. What is the practice that you use at the end of the day to mindfully remove those sticky notes from your eyes, from your face, from your head, from your arms, from your shoulders, before you go home?" People were just thinking, because there is no practice to remove those things.
I think it's a really good visualization for a lot of us to apply when we think about going into our work, whether it's in criminal law, family law, or not even law at all, it could be anything. But where trauma meets us, what is the thing that we do to pull that off of us? Because I think when we don't do that, a lot of that impact can start to creep up in our lives and our relationship.
Patrice Band:
Interesting. I think it's bang on, I keep trying to come up with metaphors and analogies, the sort of radioactive one came to mind, which I referred to earlier. But I think what I learned as well is that the person that's getting the sticky notes put on them, when they walked into that room, they were already covered in sticky notes from their own lives. I think I was naive when I was younger to not recognize that I came into the profession already bearing a pretty significant load. I think a lot of people probably think that what's on their personal life before the profession, those sticky notes maybe don't rate as much as the ones that happen from within the profession. I think that's false, at least in my experience. But I like the notion of it. I think it's really a good illustration.
You asked me what my practice is, well, I haven't learned one through my profession, which I think you and I both agree ought to start in law school to make better lawyers, more competent lawyers and healthier lawyers. I have to say sometimes, as you know in criminal court, you don't have time to engage in a practice after every case. Some cases come fast and furious. In plea court, for instance, you might go straight from hearing a victim impact statement to hearing the next case, which may or may not be particularly troublesome to you, but you don't have time to let the prior one breathe a little bit. I have a feeling that might be why a lot of people in our profession struggle with these feelings. I think one of your recent podcasts talked about... Dr. Amar Dhall talked about members of the bar being, he had that double entendre because lawyers are known to go to the bar on Friday and let off some steam. But it affects our relationships as well.
I went to a talk not that long ago talked about, their approach was to lock all these things up in a little safe in their brain. This was before I started to think a lot about this problem. But even then I thought I wouldn't want to be around when that little safe bursts open, I just don't buy that approach. But what do I do? Of course, we talk to each other, but I realized, again, slowly too late that sometimes it's not fair to unload on others the trauma we just received. They may not be prepared for that, even if they're "thick-skinned," seen in all kinds of colleagues. But that is what we have at our disposal immediately is a quick chat with a colleague down the hall for what that's worth.
I think we need to think about borrowing from medical practice and other professions who engage in debriefs regularly. But I think you need to know how to do that. Someone needs to teach us or guide us through what a healthy debrief is. Otherwise, I suppose we think we're debriefing when we go for afternoon drinks, but I don't think that's what we're doing.
Myrna McCallum:
When I talk with lawyers and others about how I... I call it either collective care strategies or resilient strategies in the workplace, one of the things that I suggest to them is creating a debriefing practice. But the debrief should be done with consent, you should ask before you speak, because we don't all have the capacity to take on more. It should be very intentional and it should be time sensitive, like if we are doing it one on one, time can [inaudible 00:20:09]. So, you're not there to talk about the new Netflix show, you're not there to talk about so-and-so who showed up in court one day. You're not there to rant and rave about all kinds of stuff. There should be a purpose and the purpose should be really clear.
Because one of the things that I have found is that what some people consider debriefing was really just sharing their trauma like, "Oh my god, I had this file and look at this," and then throw something on my desk that now I had no consent to say whether or not I wanted to look at it, I'm now looking at it, or telling me a story.
I know that there are also therapists who recommend group discussions or group debriefs that happen on a weekly basis. So, it almost becomes like a support group or a support circle, which is great. I'm a huge fan of this idea that every judiciary should have an in-house mental health person who just is there, available, everyone is required to meet with that person on a regular basis. This is how you build up your resilient strategy. There never has to be a disclosure about anybody struggling with anything, because it's just widely accepted that and so-and-so is down the hall and anytime I need to talk, I can go talk with that person or I'm already required to meet with them so many hours per month and it's just a given. If you decide you don't need it, then you just sit there and stare at each other for two hours or whatever. I'm thinking of Good Will Hunting right now, right?
Patrice Band:
Right, like was it Marcie in the Peanuts, the doctor is in with the little 5 cents sign on her little cart there? Yeah, I think that would be a good idea. I think, unfortunately, those of us in these institutions have to find our own way right now. I encourage people to have a therapist, if they can find one, and meet one that they connect with. That's been hugely beneficial to me in my life professionally and personally. But I agree with you that it would be ideal to have that open door to go to someone who's trained and who can take it and has their own ways and practices to deal with what they receive as part of their job. I don't think there's any psychiatrist who doesn't have a psychiatrist in this world.
But it brings me back to that Marratt case. I felt a very strong responsibility as sort of the captain of that room, so to speak, to try to have a chat with the staff because they stayed on board. They weren't able to get subbed out as in the previous case. After all was said and done, we just hung out a little bit in the courtroom and chatted, not really about the material, but I just felt like I wanted to know whether she was going to be okay in whatever capacity. I have to know that. But I felt really vulnerable, because I didn't think I knew how to do what it was that I wanted to do, which was to have some sort of ad hoc debrief before she went home. Then I became aware of the fact that, I think it was my responsibility that day, but completely untrained, which left me feeling like I probably didn't do her much good. All these things have made me think we need to continue talking about this, because we need to learn more about it.
Myrna McCallum:
You mentioned the word vulnerability. I think that's a word that you don't often hear in a courtroom and it's a word you don't often hear come from a judge. I think it's a word that we need to hear more often. Why? Because we are human beings doing work that puts us on the front lines of other people's traumas. I often say to leadership, when I do trainings, "If you're going to put your people on the front line of human suffering all the time, you have an obligation to see if they're wounded, because it becomes inevitable that wounding is going to occur in some way." You said a lot earlier, Pat, you're like, "I wouldn't want to be there when that lock box can't contain itself anymore." Because, yeah, I don't think that that is a healthy... I mean, maybe it works for that individual, but I don't really think that that's a healthy practice across the board.
Scott Jones, who's a police officer in Edmonton, was on my podcast and he talked a little bit about that as well, that there was this practice of police officers just suppressing, suppressing, walking it away in their minds. But eventually that thing, after taking in so much, will just blow up. Usually, the first person to become a casualty of all of that is the person who's been trying to contain it. Then the relationships flow from there. I don't think that's a healthy practice. I think things like speaking about vulnerability, connection, how do we support each other, how do we just see each other, make space to hear each other, recognize that the job that people do in that space can have an impact on your own psychology before and over time it can just multiply. I do think that there has to be more space for training people like yourself on how to do things like a meaningful debrief with folks.
There has to be training on recognizing vicarious trauma. What does that look like? What is the potential for that to occur? When I think about my conversation with Amar Dhall said, "The concept of implicit trauma, we bring our own traumas into the profession. I think some of us choose the profession because we think we don't ever have to deal with our own traumas, because law is not emotional and we're dealing with legal issues or whatever it is the stories we tell ourselves." Then nothing can be further from the truth.
So, there's an impact when we don't recognize that we bring our own traumas into the profession. Vicarious trauma, I've heard, is cumulative. So, it piles up, it piles up, it piles up, and it starts to rear its ugly head in all kinds of ways. I think alcoholism is one of those things that's too widely accepted. It's an accepted addiction that is socially promoted and it's not healthy. But there's other things that happen for people and I'm thinking about the folks listening to this conversation right now, Pat, who might be experiencing vicarious trauma. How might you recognize it in yourself? I'd like to know how you might see it, Pat.
Patrice Band:
Well, some of the obvious ways, and everybody needs to know I'm not an expert in this or anything else, frankly, but I can speak a little bit about what I've learned and seen in my own approach to things is one of the obvious ones I think is flashbacks. Whether they're auditory or visual or just recurring thoughts that are disturbing and that interfere with your day. That I think is... That's a red flag, of course, and that's an easy one to spot. I think for the rest it's much more difficult without us all becoming better educated.
But you're right, you point to substance abuse, alcoholism or binge drinking, that feeling of numbness, I think, where you hear something or see something that you know your real self would feel devastated by, but you don't for some reason that day, I think would be something that I would want to have people pause about and think, "What's happening with me if I feel numb that way?" Some other things that are very non-specific like putting things off, putting work on a file off when it's a particularly difficult one emotionally. Some people are procrastinators, I am in some aspects of my life, but I know that people can delay working on certain things that are more challenging emotionally, that trigger them in some way. Those might be some things to be aware of. But again, I'm not an expert.
Myrna McCallum:
I hear you saying you're not an expert, Pat, but I'm a firm believer that we're all experts, at least in our own lived experience. And you have that in spades. For folks listening to us talk right now, it doesn't have to be this big event that is telling you something's wrong. It usually creeps up in these tiny little ways before it becomes a big thing.
Patrice Band:
Right. I think one of the things that people experience is, they feel upset or sad maybe in a way that they're surprised by the intensity of it. I think it's almost a natural reaction for that person to say, "What's wrong with me? Why can't I handle this?" Especially when it's about someone else's trauma. I think people's inner monologue says, "What's wrong with me? It didn't even happen to me, it happened to her." I think that could be one of those signs as well when you're asking yourself that question, "Is there something wrong with me that I can't handle it?"
Which takes me to one, can I give you one of my bugbears? I can't wait to hear from real experts at your program and at others about this concept of vicarious or secondhand trauma. I can't quibble with the experts about the definitions of these things, but as lawyers and judges, we're used to giving meaning to words, giving their plain meaning to words, and I worry that those terms downgrade what we experience when we experience other people's traumas secondhand, vicarious, those words to me connote something diluted that's happening to someone else and I'm just catching it out of the corner of my eye. I don't think that's how we actually are impacted by these things time and time again.
The same way that secondhand smoke, the smoke that's coming off the cigarette is firsthand smoke for me as much as it is for the smoker. I don't know the physiology of what happens to smoke when it's inhaled and exhaled, but the cigarette that's burning in my... It's just hitting me as much as the other. I keep coming back to this in my own life, something's happening to me when I'm watching the video of a horrendous crime or assault happening in two dimensions in a courtroom. I don't buy it that something's only happening to someone else there. Different things are happening to that person than they are to me. I think maybe we need to acknowledge that if I'm right at all about any of that, then I think we need to acknowledge it. It may make us ask ourselves less frequently, "What's wrong with me? Why can't I hack it?"
Myrna McCallum:
I'm really glad that you brought that up. I mean, I don't have any answers, but I will be talking with Amar Dhall again. I think I'm going to put that question to him, because you're right, there are these concepts that are floating around that could minimize the experiences that witnesses are having, witnesses to trauma. We need to have more conversations about this topic. We need to think about how becoming witnesses to other people's trauma, how that impacts us. Because, like you said, you're having a real experience as you're witnessing these things. You're affected, and I'm sure... You talked about court staff being affected, people are being affected in these spaces and we're not really having meaningful conversations to talk about what those effects are. Maybe more importantly or equally important, having enough training and conversations and planning about how we're going to manage those things when they come up. Because trauma in the courtroom is inevitable, isn't it?
Patrice Band:
Yeah, it's inevitable. But I dispute the notion that the quantity or intensity of it or the frequency of it is inevitable, at least for any given participant. I work within a very regimented system and I can't overhaul that whole system. But there are some very simple things that I think we could do to diminish the overall exposure. I wrote about a bunch of those in Marratt, I don't know if they've been taken up or not, or ever will be, but not every court staff member has to be in the courtroom when something potentially traumatic might be on display. That's simple. The court clerk doesn't have to be there all the time, for instance. Yes, it's inevitable, but can the tap be turned down a little bit? I suppose, if you think about flow influx, I think it can in a careful way, in a judicious way, that's not unfair to one party or the other. I think we need to keep trying to discover ways that we can do that.
Myrna McCallum:
I agree 100%. Tell me, what was the response, if any, that you got from colleagues and others after you wrote that decision in Marratt or maybe in Shaw?
Patrice Band:
Yeah, Shaw didn't get any response. As people may know, some of our decisions we release orally, they may or may not lead to someone ordering a transcript, they may just never be heard from again. I don't think that one got much attention. Marratt got more attention, because I issued it in writing and it made its way onto some of the legal publication case journals so to speak. For some reason or another, it hit the press and I don't know how that happened, but I know that a reporter wrote about it and so it got some attention in that way.
I can't remember, to be honest with you, I could look back, but we are... I think all courts do this, they send around to the judges in their court decisions of some note periodically. That one may have done that, it may have been in that sort of blast that they send every few weeks with decisions of some note. So, some of my colleagues certainly did respond just by email or what have you, which happens, we do that when we read each other's work. It's been taken up by other judges, I presume, they were presented by one side or the other and they've been cited by others. I was pretty excited that it was cited by a superior court judge in Ontario named Paul Schabas, who took it up and discussed it as well.
I think that means it might be gaining some traction. It's a small decision about... Small amount of tinkering that's within my grasp. But I was happy to see that other people are starting to look at it with favor. It was also disagreed with pretty vehemently by a judge in another province, which I thought was interesting as well, for the same reasons that I hear a lot, particularly from crown attorneys, that if you don't watch it, you won't be able to understand how bad it is. Then you may not sentence the offender appropriately, which is an item I wrote about a little bit in that decision, what to do about that. Because it's a legitimate concern to some degree, but it's not necessarily etched in stone completely in Ontario that that's the truth. But there are detractors and others of course.
Myrna McCallum:
You know what, if there are any researchers, and I am not this anymore, but if there are any researchers listening to us or folks who are thinking about, "Oh, what kind of LLM topics should they focus on?" Here's one for you, look at how courts, not just across Canada, but maybe across the world, are dealing with very graphic evidence, particularly in the context of child pornography. How are they receiving it? How are they admitting it into evidence? Is there a trauma-informed way of doing this? Maybe that is the question that I would love to see somebody write about and give us some examples of what's been working, what's been accepted, where the challenges are. Can we do things in a better way? Because I think one of the challenges, Pat, that I often see sometimes some folks default to is we've always done it this way and let's just keep doing it this way.
I think the problem with that is it doesn't allow for innovation, it doesn't allow for transformation and it doesn't allow for groundbreaking better ways of doing what we've always done. I think that we constantly need to be innovating as a profession. You're an inspiration. And I really think that more judges need to be thinking about this, because what are the impacts? If we don't start to talk about the mental health and wellness of judges, what are the impacts not just to the individual human beings doing this job, but to this profession, to the judiciary.
Patrice Band:
Right. Certainly, there's a role for lawyers to play here in innovation and marshaling the social science, the law societies as well. It's nice of you to say that I'm an inspiration. Personally, I feel like I'm just tinkering with a tiny little hammer within a very limited amount of... Within a very strict system and with highly established rules and principles. But if it gets the conversation started, then that's a good thing.
There's this sense, and it's true in a lot of ways, that being a judge is the best job in the world or if not in the world, then in the legal profession. There's people tell you, "You've won the lottery." It is a wonderful job, in a lot of ways, but it's not without its challenges. I think everyone who's appointed to the bench knows they're going to be in for intellectual challenge, hard work. But nobody really tells you, by the way, you may take on a huge amount of emotional load in that job and you may not know what to do with it.
I would tell people to do their best, to have their eyes open about that, because it can be very heavy, the trauma and the trauma load. If not trauma, just compassion fatigue. You are on cloud nine when you get this job. Every judge will say that. But there are some realities to it that we definitely need to tackle. This happens to be the main one that I've become very interested in for a whole host of reasons.
I would tell people, "Be aware of that and start thinking about it now and what you can do about it to keep yourself healthy, because it's a long career." A lot of judges are being appointed younger and younger nowadays, particularly on the provincial benches. It can be a long career if you're not aware of the things that you need to manage to keep your own mental health and physical health in as good shape as they can be. If you do that, then I think you'll be better at your job and happier doing it. I hope that doesn't sound discouraging, my point isn't to discourage folks, because there's a lot of wonderful things about this job, but there's no job in the world that doesn't have its challenges.
Myrna McCallum:
That's some really fantastic advice. For folks who are listening and thinking, "Well, where do I begin to start to think about mental health and preparing for these kinds of challenges?" Well, folks, you can listen to this podcast, because I've had so many awesome judges and lawyers and police officers and psychologists talk about a whole range of things. Thank you so much, Pat, for having this conversation with all of us.
Well, that's my episode for today, folks. I really hope that you enjoyed my conversation with my friend, Pat. He inspires me beyond anything I can even articulate. I'm just going to continue to watch this judge for the moves that he makes to bring education about trauma to the forefront and just get lawyers and judges to begin to think about the ways in which everybody becomes impacted in the courtroom by the stories, the experiences that folks bring into those spaces. Hopefully, episodes like this will begin to inspire leaders, chief justices, ministers of justice, to begin to think about creating a trauma-informed courtroom. What would that look like? Call me. I would love to help out.
If you love this episode, you got feedback. You know where to find me @thetraumainformedlawyer on Instagram, @thetilpodcast on Twitter, and you can always find me on LinkedIn using my name or The Trauma-Informed Lawyer. If you liked this episode, you want to support this podcast, please head over to Ko-fi, K-O-F-I, .com/thetraumainformedlawyer and leave me a tip. Thanks so much for hanging in and always coming back. Until next time, take care. This episode was recorded on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Tsleil-Waututh people.