As reported in DV News on April 18, a respected psychiatrist, Anna María Jónsdóttir, was found liable for damages by the Reykjavík District Court due to comments she made about the father of a boy in three medical certificates she wrote for the boy’s mother.
See: Psychiatrist Anna María Jónsdóttir ordered to pay damages for remarks about her father
The mother used the certificates to fight the father’s contact with the boy. It lasted 15 months, but then the father got custody of the boy. The three doctor’s comments she made about the father in the medical certificates were ruled dead and unmarked.
Certificates needed to convince regulators
Einar Gautur Steingrímsson is the father’s lawyer and he explains what went wrong in the system and where the regulators failed.
“The certificates were necessary for the mother to convince the sheriff’s office, the police, the child protection authorities and the school that the child was a danger from the father. A certificate is a guarantee of this which you can confirm with your own experience, and therefore issued on this basis.A medical certificate therefore contains a statement that the doctor himself has become the person mentioned in it.
If there is any suspicion that a person, male or female, has abused a child, a report should be sent to child protection authorities. Then child protection authorities must investigate the case. It is not permissible to do such a thing in a certificate unless the doctor himself has witnessed what he declares.”
I never met the father but based on a one sided story
“The sheriff’s office, police and child welfare authorities considered the certificates to be good and valid and trusted their accuracy. The school did not get swallowed up and the competent principal handed over the case in the hands of the child protection committee.”
Anna María never met the father and said she herself based her assessment on the mother’s one-sided account. It later turned out that the allegations did not hold up and the father eventually won full custody of the boy.
“Even if a doctor believes an account of abuse, they cannot testify about the alleged abuser’s behavior based solely on the other party’s account.”
The judgment states, among other things: “Healthcare workers must exercise care, accuracy and fairness when issuing certificates, opinions, professional statements and reports and certify only what they know. be true and necessary in each case”.
Einar says the National Medical Examiner’s Office reminded Anna María about issuing the certificates
Easy to lie to everyone
Einar says there is no theoretical or scientific basis to say who is lying or not.
“A psychiatrist cannot, on the basis of his training, assess whether the account of the alleged victim is true. He is no more capable of this than a man who works on a cut in a salting factory. talks about a study in which some lawyers, police officers and judges were better than others at judging like this. It may not be based on job training but on work experience. It’s that easy to lie to a psychologist than to a housekeeper,” Einar says and adds:
“This idea, that there is a college education, where people can find out if people are telling the truth, is nonsense. It’s as crazy as when priests had to find out, centuries ago, who a witch was. .There is no science behind such a thing, which is why the psychiatrist could not use the mother’s account as fact in the certificate. There is no scientific basis for such a thing.”
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Regulators waived duty to investigate
Einar Gautur argues that public sector regulators have failed at all levels of the case.
“These parties have a duty to investigate. But in this case it was disabled. The existence of the certificates is the only thing that could explain this. Therefore, the story of the mother, who had already lost custody of three children and also had a long history of drug use, was not taken into account.
Child protection authorities should independently investigate the case and find out the truth. But such an investigation never took place. The sheriff was supposed to do the same, but there was only a wall up against the father.
And the police were supposed to investigate reports of violence against a child, entrusted to the mother, and join the case. But that was not done either. There, the principle of believing the victims has been badly derogated from. The police chose not to believe the child.
If these parties had fulfilled their duty, for example, a drug test would have been carried out at an early stage of the case. This has not been done.”
expert worship
When Einar is asked what can be done to prevent this from happening again in the system, he says the New Testament describes it well. “What people do in secret should be shouted from the rooftops.”
“The discussion must be open and the flow of information to the public must be increased.
And this cult of experts only harms the justice system and, in my opinion, has sent innocent people to prison,” Einar adds.
This morning, DV publishes a detailed interview with the child’s father, in which he recounts, among other things, his six-year struggle for contact with his son.
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