Mr John Croker1, Doctor Jacques Claassen1
1Parkville Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Service, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Dr Claassen is a forensic psychiatrist. He operates across the public health and private Court report writing sectors. He oversees custodial mental health service provision in three Victorian youth custodial precincts and provides expert testimony in NSW, Vic and Cth jurisdictions in both criminal and civil settings.
Mr Croker is a lawyer specialising in human rights law, with previous experience providing human rights legal advice across a range of public contexts, including to police, prisons, schools, and hospitals. He has qualifications from the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford.
Abstract:
The tension between recovery and community safety sits at the heart of forensic practice, and nowhere is this dilemma more acute than in youth forensic mental health service provision, where clinicians and lawyers must balance a young person's developmental trajectory against the imperative to protect the community. This presentation argues that human rights law offers not merely a compliance framework, but an apt foundational pillar for resolving that dilemma in practice.
The Parkville Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing Service (PYMHWS) is a newly established public health service for 12 to 25 year olds, created in response to findings of the Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health. Jointly delivered by the Custodial Forensic Youth Mental Health lead at PYMHWS (Dr Claassen) and the service's General Counsel (Mr Croker), this presentation demonstrates how a human rights framework is used to deliver tailored forensic mental healthcare to young people across Victoria.
Drawing on case studies from the first 12 months of the PYMHWS forensic youth mental health service, the presenters will show how human rights law helps identify where the balance should sit between a young person's recovery and the safety of the community; providing a principled, transparent method for resolving the forensic dilemma at the level of individual clinical and legal decision-making, rather than treating it as an abstract policy trade-off.
This presentation will be of interest to psychiatrists, psychologists, and lawyers working across the youth forensic interface, and to those grappling with how rights-based frameworks translate into day-to-day forensic practice.