I wish to thank the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights for the opportunity to appear today.
My name is Mark Zaborowski, and I am appearing as an individual with 30 years of experience in the community mental health field, providing supportive housing and case management programs for the mentally ill. Twenty-five of these years were in management. In addition to this work experience, a few years ago I trained as a volunteer community mediator, and in 2013 I did a year of community mediation. This year I trained to be a compassion fatigue educator with the TEND Academy out of Kingston, Ontario.
Over my career, I came to experience operational stress injury in the form of compassion fatigue, which I understand to be a loss of caring due to constant exposure to demands from those who are in pain and suffering, both emotionally or physically.
In addition, I experienced secondary trauma, which occurred when I was exposed to the traumatic stories of our clients, both while I was in the mental health field and as a community mediator.
I found myself having symptoms of hopelessness, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, depression, and anger, some of which occurred after spending hours in mediation with angry people. In addition, over time the repeated exposure to secondary trauma led to a condition I've come to understand as vicarious trauma, whereby my perception of the world fundamentally changed. I saw psychiatric crises wherever I went.
These events led me to explore this emotional distress that I felt. What was my distress? Was I bearing witness to others' suffering? Was this empathy? Was it empathetic distress? Was this compassion?
As I asked these questions and got counselling, read, studied, and trained, I landed on discussions and research on psychological and neuroscientific foundations of empathy and compassion, now known as compassion science.
Tania Singer, a neuroscientist from Germany, in her e-book “Compassion: Bridging Practice and Science” is one of the groundbreakers in this field. Her research, I believe, is promoting ways to care for the caregivers, for those who bear witness to others' suffering, and has the potential to inform the topic of psychological preparedness for, and resilience to, exposure to traumatic stories.
This committee has heard deeply moving, lived-experience testimony from a number of jurors who suffered PTSD, and their struggle to find help through the courts and in the mental health system after the trials. While I have not yet been called for jury selection, I did receive my jury questionnaire a few months ago, and as I listened to the proceedings on November 22, I thought about the questionnaire and the science of psychological preparedness and resilience.
My first recommendation pertains to the pretrial information package that has been discussed here. I propose that it include a chapter on psychological preparedness and resiliency, with reading material, links to the Internet, and websites that will have training videos for jurors to prepare them for their time as jurors.
Ideally these links should have the most current information and practices that jurors could read about before they head into court. There would be a range of suggestions, as not all jurors are alike. There would also be procedural guidelines for the role of the juror. The pretrial information package could arrive with the juror questionnaire or be provided at the time of jury selection.
Why is this important? There is research and cross-fertilization from the neurosciences, psychology, psychiatry, and the contemplative practices that point to therapeutic approaches and teachings that may lessen the emotional impact of viewing traumatic material. Jurors may suffer less. We train and provide focused orientation to all sorts of professionals in our society; why wouldn't we be providing the best possible knowledge and research to help mitigate the effects of exposure to traumatic material to a group of ordinary citizens who, as jurors, could be sitting for weeks, if not months?
My second recommendation is that a national office for juror support be established. As there is a national study and forthcoming recommendations for national standards, a national office could oversee these standards. As an example, we need look no further than our own Mental Health Commission of Canada and the impact of the voluntary standards on psychological health and safety in the workplace since January 2013.
The office could manage the collection, coordination, website links, and dissemination of all information, and provide an access point for any juror to get provincial information and referral contacts from a system navigator.
My third recommendation is that there be an international conference every two years on juror support, where there would be a discussion among leading experts in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, law, philosophy, theology, and other disciplines to examine the confluence and cross-fertilization of these disciplines in understanding how to support and protect our jurors from psychological harm and to better understand the features that not only provide natural resilience but build new resilience.
Middle management plays a key role in supporting staff, paid or unpaid, and PTSD symptoms can arise in people who have no known prior vulnerability, so my fourth recommendation is that the National Judicial Institute should add to their workshop curriculum one on juror support. This would assist judges in learning about the range and depth of support options as identified through the new standards and possible Criminal Code amendments.
My fifth recommendation refers to amending section 649 of the Criminal Code.
Why have we legislated and legitimized one of the key symptoms of trauma—namely, silence—into the expected court behaviour of jurors? In addition to cautioning jurors as to what not to say and to whom, could judges also advise jurors about whom they are permitted to speak with?
Michaela Swan, one of the jurors, spoke of thinking that she would break the law if she spoke about the jury deliberations to her counsellor. Telling stories is what we do every day with each other. Telling stories releases trauma and heals trauma, and telling stories can also perpetuate trauma. Jurors need someone or somewhere to tell their stories. The Criminal Code could be amended, as it has been in one jurisdiction, to allow for jurors to speak in complete confidence about all aspects of the trial, including their deliberations, with an appropriate court-appointed counsellor.
The sixth recommendation is on variations of counselling supports. Individual counselling supports for jurors during and after trial are absolutely essential. Not everyone will have symptoms immediately, and two months may not be sufficient to access counselling services. Consider offering counselling for up to a year, with extensions by application. Semi-annual check-ins for up to a year for jurors should be instituted as part of a greater safety net to ensure no one is being missed, as several jurors spoke of their families insisting that they seek help.
Jury deliberation sounds very intense. Both as a community mediator and as a program manager, I know how meetings can be emotionally charged. Imagine being in one long meeting for days and days. Could the foreperson who is overseeing the jury deliberation not have access to a management consultant for group process issues as needed? Critical incident stress debriefings at the end of a trial for individuals and groups should be offered, and more than once for those who initially declined but may wish to debrief days or weeks later. Imagine a network of former jurors who are part of a peer support model with complete confidentiality, a buddy system across all provinces.
Finally, I wish to return to my first recommendation, the pretrial information package that would have information on self-care, self-management, natural resiliency, and healthy empathetic responses. How many thousands of Canadians receive their juror questionnaire and shortly thereafter head for jury selection? Consider the nationwide health promotion opportunity when Canadians get immunized for any trauma exposure through their pretrial information package, whether they're selected for jury duty or not.
This year's Writer's Trust award for non-fiction went to James Maskalyk for Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine. In his introduction, he writes, “Medicine is life caring for itself.” I believe that is what we are doing here today.
Thank you so much.