George Rudolph Gilbert, known as “Stella”, who has battled a longstanding mental illness, yesterday endorsed the HRC’s proposal to outlaw mental health discrimination.

Bermuda should plug a “glaring gap” in its anti discrimination law and protect people with mental illnesses from discrimination.

This from Michael Hanson, chairman of the island’s Human Rights Commission, who told a media roundtable that he was at a loss to explain why it is not unlawful to discriminate against someone who is mentally ill.

“Without a doubt the most glaring gap in the Human Rights Act, 1981 is the lack of protection for people with mental health [conditions].

“To be blunt its over 30 years and its outstanding to me that its not in the Act,” he said.

People with mental illnesses are among the most vulnerable people in Bermuda and “they are the ones who are not protected,” he continued.

Sixty year old George Rudolph Gilbert who says he has fully recovered from a longstanding mental illness told Politica he did not think he had ever been discriminated against by an employer on mental health grounds.

But he hailed the HRC’s proposal as a “good thing” as employers should give the mentally ill a shot at a job.

“They [employers] should give them a try. That’s the way I got mine. I wash cars, but its steady work”, he said. “I told them it’s like getting paid for exercise.”

The Human Rights Act, 1981, prohibits discrimination on a number of grounds, including physical disability in the workplace, housing and provision of goods and services.

Hanson said he had encountered some resistance to the idea of including mental health in the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination particularly in the workplace.

But he noted that the Act provides some protection for employers whose businesses may face unreasonable hardship to accommodate someone with a physical disability and a similar regime could be followed with respect to mental health.

Five mental health discrimination complaints were received by the HRC over the last nine months but the agency was unable to act.

A 2011 Government-commissioned survey found that 14 percent of adults in Bermuda had a depressive disorder.

And the Bermuda Health Council’s Health Disparities report last year found that one in five adults reported being mentally unwell for more than three days in the previous month.

The HRC plans to submit its proposals to the Government within the next two months.

Other proposed reforms include fixing a loophole in the law which excludes the interior of a place of business from the definition of a public place.

And the HRC wants the legislation to prohibit discrimination by perception and by association.

That would make it unlawful to discriminate against someone who is wrongly perceived to have a particular protected characteristic, or who is associated with someone who has a protected characteristic.

This article belongs to Politica ! The original article can be found here: HRC: Lets prohibit mental health discrimination

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