By Devon McMahon

Earlier this month, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) decided that students at York University in Toronto looking to access disability accommodations for mental health reasons no longer need to disclose a psychiatric diagnosis. The impact of this decision will extend well beyond York; according to their Jan. 6 news release, “The OHRC urges other post-secondary institutions to follow suit.”

These policy changes are expected to strengthen the rights of post-secondary students by both protecting student privacy and making the process of registering for accommodations more accessible by allowing general practitioners to endorse student requests for accommodations. Previously, support registration required students to visit a psychiatrist.

The question now is whether compliance with new norms will be voluntary or forced.

navi2Renu Mandhane, Ontario’s Human Rights Commissioner, advised students via Twitter to ask their school what documentation they require. If their university’s policies are in violation of the Commission’s decision, students can notify their school of the Commission’s position and anti-discrimination policy.

Navi Dhanota, the PhD student who filed the initial human rights complaint against York for being required to disclose her mental health diagnosis, explains that these changes will not be formalized immediately. “This will take time,” she says. In the interim, she encourages students to challenge their institution’s access requirements. “If they do not accommodate, I believe students will have the grounds to file their own human rights complaint against the university – and should do so.”

Navi

Will Carleton follow York? Will they get up to speed with human rights and loosen their hold on psychiatric diagnosis disclosure?

The Paul Menton Centre (PMC) is Carleton’s gateway to academic accommodations, providing counselling and arranging for other supports as part of individualized accommodation plans. Carleton said in a press release that the PMC “has been heralded as the gold standard for disability support services in Canada,” and yet there are considerable barriers preventing students from accessing the PMC. These barriers relate directly to the DSM and psychiatric assessment model.

The DSM – short for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – is a highly controversial assessment tool. It was most memorably criticized for including homosexuality and is often blamed for over-medicalizing individual needs and subjectively grouping them under labels. DSMs have been resisted by many psychiatric survivors and consumers of psychiatric services who feel that the tool is more harmful than it is helpful. From this perspective, the emphasis on catch-all labels clashes with the experiences of the individual and contradicts the goal of understanding and supporting individual needs.

While the PMC does provide some flexibility in its access requirements, there is no guarantee that a general practitioner’s note will be accepted by the centre. The PMC website states: “Comprehensive documentation meeting all other requirements but from a family physician or other general practitioner, may be adequate to support the provision of interim accommodations. The purpose of this interim period of support is to allow time for a student to seek the required documentation from a qualified assessor (psychiatrist or registered psychologist).”

Furthermore, “To be comprehensive, the documentation needs to include the assessor’s DSM-IV diagnosis.”

Charissa Feres has been working on a student-led advocacy council that collects feedback on the PMC, among other services at Carleton. According to Feres, this study indicates that DSM labelling also affects the quality of services that students receive from support systems like the PMC. “When they know the specific diagnosis, they start assuming they know what the student needs when in reality student needs are often different,” she says.

With the trend set in motion by Dhanota’s legal action, Carleton may have to adapt and abolish the DSM disclosure requirement altogether. The PMC, which has a reputation for path-breaking work in previous decades, has an opportunity to play a leadership role once again.

This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol.8 No. 4 (Jan/Feb 2016).