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Being overwhelmed

It was raised in consultations that people with a mental illness can become overwhelmed by their legal issues, and that as a result, they may avoid addressing them and accessing legal assistance.¹⁸ A few stakeholders reported that people with depression may be overwhelmed by their problems and so may not be motivated to access a legal service provider.¹⁹

When someone is very ill and depressed, they are not going to be motivated to get any legal advice.²⁰

It depends on what sort of mental illness people have, but some people might believe that no one can help them [if] they are suffering from depression. So they might not be able to access services simply because of the way they are looking at the world at that time. People can’t see how they can be helped, because their problems are just so overwhelming.²¹

In addition, a couple of service providers argued that people with a mental illness may be so frightened by having a legal problem that they will avoid addressing it:

[It’s a] general mental illness thing. People get confused and … they cope really poorly with solving the problem, because of the mental illness. They hide, they run. People without mental illness do that too, but it seems to be more pronounced [for people with a mental illness].²²

I know people who get mail, who are so freaked out, they don’t open it. So it piles up, and the problem just gets worse and worse, because they cannot make the first step to deal with it, because it’s just getting bigger and bigger. And so the [problem] escalates, because their capacity at that time to actually deal with these life issues isn’t there.²³

Roundtable attendees suggested that situating legal services in places where people with a mental illness would normally go in the course of their day-to-day activities might increase the accessibility of these services.²⁴ This could also address the barriers caused by a lack of motivation and fear of the problem.