Book Review: Law and Mental Health in Canada: Cases and Materials

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

Law and Mental Health in Canada: Cases and Materials. Edited by Anita Szigeti & Ruby Dhand. Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2022. xxix, 552 p. Includes table of cases, table of statutes, and index. ISBN 9780433525165 (softcover) $135.00.

Reviewed by Melanie R. Bueckert
Legal Research Counsel
Manitoba Court of Appeal

Law and Mental Health in Canada: Cases and Materials is a law school casebook that addresses many aspects of mental health law in Canada, from civil mental health law to mental disorders in criminal justice matters. This comprehensive text provides practical guidance for lawyers practicing mental health law, covering many related topics. The text includes an entire chapter devoted to advocacy tools, trauma-informed lawyering, empathy, and increasing access to justice, as well as a separate section on practice issues for lawyers regarding fitness to stand trial.

Overall, the text focuses heavily on Ontario law, although there are some references to other jurisdictions, such as British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba. The civil mental health law chapters address topics such as civil commitment, consent to treatment, guardianship and powers of attorney, and personal health information protection. The criminal justice chapters address mental disorder, fitness to stand trial, not criminally responsible verdicts, review boards, dangerous and long-term offender proceedings, and specialized courts and mental health considerations in bail and sentencing. There is also a separate chapter devoted to Indigenous peoples and mental health law, and information regarding coroner’s inquests in Ontario is also included.

The contributing authors are knowledgeable and experienced in this area, having written other similar works that are quoted extensively in this text. While it is understandable (and, indeed, expected) that authors would draw on their related prior works, the numerous repetitive citations to those works risk overpowering the substantive discussions. There are many pages that are half footnotes, and excerpts from related prior works also feature extensively throughout. With respect to formatting, the use of short forms like ibid and supra could have cut down the volume of footnotes drastically, allowing the main text to enjoy more prominence.

As expected for a work of this nature, the text features a variety of case excerpts. Many of the cases cited are quite recent, including the Supreme Court’s decision in R v Zora, 2020 SCC 14 and the Ontario case R v Fabbro, 2021 ONCA 494, and they are all helpfully identified in the table of cases at the end of the book. Unfortunately, the formatting of the case extracts is not uniform throughout the volume, and in some instances it appears that trial-level decisions were preferred over appellate cases; for example, on page 421, R v Bohemier, 2002 MBQB 198 and R v Pearce, 2016 MBQB 14 are cited, but R v Friesen, 2016 MBCA 50 is not.

Personally, two of my favourite parts of this book are the ladder graphic on page 352 that explains the “laddered approach” to bail and the chart that identifies the specialized mental health courts across Canada, which begins on page 375. Notes and questions for reflection feature prominently throughout the text, and each chapter begins with a helpful table of contents.

With respect to published works on the topic of law and mental health in Canada, Justice Richard D. Schneider has published many books on mental health law with Irwin Law. However, none of those texts are law school casebooks such as this one. Carswell’s main mental health text is the Mental Disorder in Canadian Criminal Law looseleaf service authored by Justice Joan Barrett and Justice Riun Shandler. As such, this text fills a gap in the existing literature, targeting students and junior lawyers.

Law and Mental Health in Canada: Cases and Materials will undoubtedly be helpful for those teaching and taking courses related to mental health law, as well as lawyers beginning to practice in this area. Recent cases, like R v Patchinose, 2023 MBCA 58, remind us that issues relating to mental health can arise in many different areas of law, and lawyers need to be alert in identifying them for the benefit of their clients.