Draft:R v Health Commission of Victoria; ex parte McDonald: Difference between revisions

This is a draft Articles for creation (AfC) submission. It is not currently pending review. While there are no deadlines, abandoned drafts may be deleted after six months. To edit the draft click on the “Edit” tab at the top of the window. To be accepted, a draft should: It is strongly discouraged to write about either yourself or your business or employer. If you do so, you must declare it. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags.

R v Health Commission of Victoria; ex parte McDonald was a 1979 habeas corpus case heard in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia, in which the court ordered the release of Anne McDonald, a woman with severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disability, from St Nicholas Hospital, a government institution in Carlton, Melbourne. The case was initiated on McDonald’s behalf by Rosemary Crossley, who claimed to communicate with McDonald through a technique later known as facilitated communication (FC). The court accepted the validity of McDonald’s FC-produced communication over objections from a senior clinical psychologist who argued the testing conditions were not experimentally controlled.

The case is considered a landmark in both Australian deinstitutionalization and the history of facilitated communication. It provided early legal legitimacy for FC, which has since been scientifically discredited as a communication method.^[2]

Background

Anne McDonald and St Nicholas Hospital

Anne McDonald was born on 11 January 1961 in Seymour, Victoria. A birth injury caused severe athetoid cerebral palsy and intellectual disability; she could not walk, talk, or feed herself.^[3] At the age of three, her parents placed her in St Nicholas Hospital, a Health Commission institution for children with severe disabilities in Carlton, Melbourne. The hospital had opened in 1964 on the site of the former Children’s Hospital and housed more than 160 residents by the 1970s.^[4]

Conditions at St Nicholas were later described as severely neglectful. McDonald received no education or therapy during her institutionalization. A contemporary news report from 1975 stated that she had not left the hospital in eleven years. The Health Commission later conceded in court that at age sixteen, McDonald weighed only 12 kilograms (26 pounds).^[3][5]

Facilitated communication

In 1975, Rosemary Crossley began working at St Nicholas Hospital as a playleader. In 1977, she reported that she had found a way to communicate with McDonald by physically supporting her upper arm while McDonald selected word blocks and magnetic letters.^[6] Crossley later developed this technique into what became known as facilitated communication training (FCT), in which a facilitator provides physical support to a person’s hand, wrist, or arm while they point at letters on a communication board or keyboard.^[2]

Some of Crossley’s co-workers at the hospital suspected she was moving McDonald’s hand and was actually the one communicating. Crossley herself acknowledged that she suspected she might be “making up sentences to fit what were really random twitchings.”^[3] Through facilitated communication, McDonald appeared to express a desire to leave St Nicholas Hospital and live with Crossley. McDonald’s parents and the hospital authorities refused the request, arguing that the reality of her communication had not been established.^[6]

Proceedings

In 1979, when McDonald turned eighteen, a habeas corpus application was commenced in the Supreme Court of Victoria on her behalf. The respondents were the Health Commission of Victoria, Dr George Lipton (Director of the Mental Health Division), and Dr Dennis Maginn (Superintendent of St Nicholas Hospital). The application challenged the lawfulness of McDonald’s continued detention at the institution.^[7]

Psychological testing

As part of the proceedings, the Health Commission arranged for two senior independent psychologists to test McDonald using written material that Crossley had not seen. They reported that McDonald “did indeed answer the questions, and in each case, had read the material and questions.”^[8]

However, Patricia Margaret Minnes, then senior clinical psychologist with Mental Retardation Services of the Health Commission of Victoria, who was present during the psychological testing, objected to the assessment’s conclusions. Minnes stated:

However in my opinion the results of this assessment cannot be considered objectively reliable and valid until such time as Anne is shown to perform at a similar intellectual level under experimentally controlled conditions. In my view there are at least three variables which need to be controlled, namely — (a) the nature of support to Anne’s arm, (b) the amount of information available to the supporting person regarding the response requested of Anne, and (c) the nature of Anne’s responses.^[9]

The three variables Minnes identified — the physical support given to the communicator, the facilitator’s knowledge of the expected response, and the nature of the communicator’s responses — later became central methodological criteria in controlled studies of facilitated communication, the vast majority of which found that the facilitator, not the person with disabilities, was the source of the communication.^[2]

Decision

The court accepted that McDonald’s communication was her own and ordered her release from St Nicholas Hospital. In May 1979, McDonald left the institution and went to live with Crossley and Crossley’s partner, Chris Borthwick.^[6][7]

Subsequent proceedings

Following McDonald’s release, Crossley returned to court to have McDonald’s financial affairs removed from the control of the Public Trustee. The court acknowledged potential conflicts of interest, with an appointee noting that Crossley “may make a personal gain. She conceded that she may do so.” The court nonetheless concluded that “if such motive exists, it is of a secondary nature” and relinquished the Public Trustee’s control over McDonald in September 1979. Crossley subsequently signed a publishing contract with Penguin Books Australia in both her and McDonald’s names for the book Annie’s Coming Out (1980).^[10]

Crossley attempted to use similar habeas corpus proceedings to secure the release of other St Nicholas residents. However, in 1984, the court in Wallace v Health Commissioner declined the application, citing the findings of the 1980 Eisen Committee Report, which had investigated and rejected Crossley’s claims regarding other patients’ ability to communicate through facilitated communication.^[10]

Legacy

Deinstitutionalization

The case, along with the subsequent book Annie’s Coming Out and its 1984 film adaptation, drew public attention to conditions at St Nicholas Hospital and contributed to the closure of the institution. St Nicholas was subsequently closed and its residents relocated to small community residential units, in what became the first major step in the deinstitutionalization of disability care in Victoria.^[11][12]

Facilitated communication debate

The case provided early legal and institutional legitimacy for facilitated communication. The court’s acceptance of FC evidence was subsequently cited by FC proponents as validation of the technique.^[2] Douglas Biklen of Syracuse University visited Crossley in Australia and went on to popularize facilitated communication in the United States beginning in 1989.^[6]

However, controlled studies conducted in the early 1990s consistently found that facilitators, not the individuals with disabilities, were the source of FC-produced communication.^[2] Facilitated communication has since been rejected by major professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, as a scientifically discredited technique.

The methodological objections raised by Patricia Minnes during the 1979 proceedings — concerning facilitator knowledge, physical support, and response control — anticipated the controlled testing protocols that later demonstrated FC’s invalidity.^[9]

See also

References

Sources

• Dwyer, Joan (1996). “Facilitated Communication: A Legal Issue”. Australian Journal of Administrative Law. 3 (2): 73–119.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)