A Canadian Police Department and the Canadian College of Psychologists

Kenneth Westhues, Professor of Sociology at the University of Waterloo, studied a case of a police officer targeted for elimination after reporting corruption to provincial authorities. The Police Department had enlisted the services of both a psychologist and a psychiatrist in support of its aim to get rid of the whistleblower. The latter, however, withstood the campaign against him and successfully held onto his job. Subsequently, he sought sanctions against the psychologist and the psychiatrist, and asked Westhues to set down in writing his reflections on the actions against him. Here is Westhues’s account, with names and other identifying information removed.

You have asked that I give you my reflections on the actions of the Police Department against you from the mid-1990s until 2000. I write on the basis of the documentation you have provided to me in connection with my research on workplace mobbing, an uncommon but severe organizational pathology that can have unwarranted, devastating effects on the mobbing target’s career and life. I understand that the reason you have requested this letter is so that you might include it with your request to the Ontario Health Professions Appeal and Review Board, that it review the decision of the Complaints Committee of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the separate decision of the Complaints Committee of the Ontario College of Psychologists.

In the mid-1990s, you reported in good faith to the appropriate provincial authorities what you saw as corruption in the Police Department. The appropriate body investigated, and found your allegations to have merit. In the wake of this conflict, your Police Department engaged psychologist Dr. X and psychiatrist Dr. Y to give their opinions on your mental health. Without speaking with you, both Dr. X and Dr. Y signed their names to reports that strongly suggested you were mentally ill. Dr. X wrote in December 1998, that your “thinking appears delusional to the extreme,” and he wrote in his own hand, “I essentially agree,” on a police investigator’s memo summarizing his meeting with them. The memo included these assertions:

• The issue is that the man’s thinking is disordered.
• You need to find a way to get him to a psychiatric assessment by compulsion, because he’s probably not going to accept that he has a problem.
• If you have enough information to arrest him and take him to a psychiatric facility - do it.
• It is easier to contain an explosion than an implosion - you shouldn’t blame yourself if he commits suicide.

Dr. Y wrote in January, 1999, that it was “in the realm of possibility” that you had a “Paranoid Personality Disorder,” and that “a psychiatric assessment would be required to rule this out.”

Shortly after Dr. X’s and Dr. Y’s reports, neither of which was provided to you, you were suspended from your position and charged under the Police Services Act. This was in January of 1999. It took almost two years, until November of 2000, for you to clear your name and get free of the stress and stigma of administrative sanction. In the end, you were found guilty of no offense. You have continued as before, to fulfill capably and with honour your responsibilities as a police officer.

In your complaints to their respective colleges, you fault Dr. X and Dr. Y for failing to live up to the ethical codes of their professions. The Complaints Committee of the College of Psychologists dismissed almost all of your complaint; the Complaints Committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons dismissed your complaint entirely.

The decision of the Complaints Committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons contains obviously false statements about the most basic facts of the case:

• The Committee says you were “later dismissed from the police force.” You were not and have never been dismissed. You were and remain an officer with an unblemished record.
• The Committee accepted the word of Dr. Y that your Police Department required you to undergo an assessment by Dr. X, the psychologist. Further, according to the Committee, Dr. Y reported that Dr. X had concluded from his assessment that you posed a possible risk of harm to others, that you are the type of personality that could “go postal,” that your thinking was disordered, that you were at high risk for suicide, and that you should be examined by a psychiatrist.

In fact, your Police Department never required, and you did not at any time undergo, such an assessment. The decision of the Complaints Committee of the College of Psychology admits that Dr. X made his comments about you without having assessed you.

An organization’s employment of mental-health practitioners to stigmatize, discredit, and harm a targeted worker is a common mobbing technique. The harm is exacerbated when the professional bodies to which the worker may appeal, fail to investigate thoroughly and to hold the practitioners responsible for their part in the mobbing process.

I would not presume to say what corrective action the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board should take. Public safety requires, however, that regulatory bodies not be allowed to gloss over any complicity of mental-health professionals in efforts by employers to discredit sane, responsible employees who have blown the whistle on administrative misconduct.

I hope that you and the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board may find these reflections on the actions against you helpful toward a fair and truthful resolution of your complaints. Best wishes.

Postscript. The body to which the police officer appealed, and to which he submitted Westhues’s letter, dismissed the appeal. One member of the hearing committee told the police officer at the hearing that when you stick your finger in a hornets’ nest, you can expect to get stung.