ABSTRACT
So many cases of iatrogenic damage are intractable, and obviously it will take a long time for any significant changes in professional and institutional procedures to occur that might reduce their prevalence. Therefore, we must realize that perhaps among our most feasible and highest priorities for dealing with this issue, certainly in the short term, is to intervene with its victims. This may involve explaining to them as early in the process as possible what is actually happening to them. It would involve helping them to look behind the rhetorical and legal facade at what their actual situation may be, based on the stereotypical patterns of other iatrogenic cases. Most clients, and many lawyers too, unless they have been exposed to other similar instances, will have difficulty believing that the “misunderstandings” of professionals and the legal complications that ensue cannot be cleared up relatively quickly. At first they may not believe that their experiences fit into a well-established mold that will wear them down with false hopes and mirages of solutions in a few weeks or months or in the next court hearing, which inevitably leads to another hearing and more after that. They may be puzzled and demoralized by the apparently unaccountable animosity of the caregivers. As one client kept asking us, “Why is the welfare officer being so mean to me? Why does she hate me so much? Why does she yell at me? She barely knows me. I haven’t done anything to her.” The answer was that the reality of the mother and her actual interactions with the welfare officer had little to do with the latter’s attitudes, which were stereotypes that were impervious to the mother’s arguments and to her actual personality. Clients, brought to gradually realize the futility of struggling against the Kafkaesque outer appearance of the case, and helped instead to see its inner rationality may be less liable to waste energy and resources fighting straw men. Focusing on the logic behind the apparently illogical and absurd is itself empowering, since it enables those buffeted by apparently unpredictable and random blows to orient themselves and to begin to plan realistically.
