[Grant] Lester [a forensic psychiatrist] and fellow Melbourne-based forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen have led the recent revival of a 19th-century diagnosis of "querulous paranoia" for people for whom some minor wrong has become an all-consuming obsession. Lester says about half of those on vexatious litigants lists have the personality disorder.
According to Lester, the typical querulant is a man in middle age who often has a family and has held down a steady job, but who is entering a period of self-reflection when he receives "a blow to his senses". Property disputes, divorce and claims of workplace racism are common themes.
"Something begins to click in this individual," says Lester. "That particular dispute echoes their past experience, and begins to mean something about self-value." They start to carry around bags of paperwork. They use exclamation marks in groups of three. They tend to "delight in the use of multiple colour highlighter pens".
Querulants are made, says Lester, not born. "The right series of events could trigger it in anyone. Some are more vulnerable than others, but there's a bit of the querulous in each of us."
Lester emphasises that the term does not apply to social reformers and campaigners with a public interest agenda. Its relative obscurity today is due in part to the misdiagnosis of such people in the past. In the Soviet Union, the KGB silenced political dissenters with punitive psychiatry: having them declared mentally unwell. Of course, many vexatious litigants, Rahman included, maintain that they are fighting not for themselves but for the common good.
...The Canadian judge Yves-Marie Morissette says a vexatious litigant's initial complaint is often "a 'platonic injustice' -- a loss, an injury or an indignity which, in law, does not entitle the prejudiced party to reparation". These are the grievances the rest of us simply accept as a cost of doing business in life. We might grumble about a suspiciously high water bill, say, but even a strongly worded letter to the water company is usually too much fuss. In the cost--benefit analysis, taking a stand isn't worth it, we tell ourselves, and anyway, it is bound to fail. The vexatious litigant rejects this premise.
"Arguably, it is not that VLs cannot grasp reality, but that they refuse to accept reality's presumptions," writes the UK-based academic Didi Herman.
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