St Philips is boasting about another Wendy Miller strike-out win. Fine. Chambers can cheer. But buried in the self-congratulation is a grim little idea about depression that feels less like modern understanding and more like a tribunal dragged in from the 1200s. The claimant relied on depression to explain delay. The answer, as St Philips tells it, was essentially this: you were still coherent enough to articulate and clarify things, so your depression does not get you home. In other words, if you were not lying in a ditch speaking in tongues, tough luck.
Chambers Is Proud Of This
St Philips has published the result with a smile.
Wendy Miller, we are told, secured strike-out of multiple claims in a complex employment tribunal matter involving whistleblowing, unfair dismissal and insolvency issues. The administrators were found not to be employers. The whistleblowing detriment claims were struck out as out of time. So far, standard chambers victory-note stuff. Neat, technical, polished.
Then comes the revealing bit.
The claimant had sought to amend 9 months late, relying on depression as the reason for the delay. The tribunal, according to chambers’ own write-up, found that explanation did not satisfy the legal test, particularly because the claimant was still able to articulate and clarify his claims in the meantime.
And there it is. The old filth in one clean line.
The Coherence Trap
The logic is rotten.
Depression is not a medieval curse where the sufferer must present as permanently mute, bedridden or visibly broken every waking second or else lose the right to be believed. Real people with depression can still type emails, answer questions, articulate claims, attend meetings, dress themselves, even crack a joke, while still being ill enough for the condition to wreck judgement, timing, energy, consistency, confidence and the basic ability to manage legal life properly.
That is not exotic. It is ordinary.
Yet again the law, or at least the way it gets narrated in these triumphal little employment write-ups, seems to slide toward the same stupid moral test: if you managed any coherence at all, perhaps you were not really impaired in the right way. If you could still put sentences together, perhaps your suffering was not pure enough to count.
That is not rigour. That is antique thinking with a wig on.
Depression Is Not Possession
This is the bit that really stinks.
Modern mental health understanding is not especially mysterious. Depression comes in degrees. It fluctuates. It can coexist with periods of outward functionality. A person can still continue with parts of ordinary life and still be ill. A person can appear articulate and still be in serious psychological trouble. None of that is revolutionary. It is basic.
But tribunal culture still seems magnetised to a much older instinct: visible collapse equals credibility, continued function equals suspicion. It is the same grubby little reflex all over again. Not, what did the condition actually do to this person’s ability to manage the litigation? But, ah, they were still coherent enough to do something, so let’s act as though the illness had no proper procedural weight.
That is 1200s reasoning. Dress it up in statutory language all you like.
Wendy Miller’s Win, Someone Else’s Reality
To be clear, this is not a claim that Wendy Miller invented the law, invented the test or personally wrote the tribunal’s reasons. It is simpler than that. Her chambers has chosen to market the result in a way that puts this logic centre stage and invites applause for it.
That matters.
Because once chambers chooses to boast publicly about a claimant’s depression-based explanation being rejected on the basis that he was still capable of articulating and clarifying claims, it is no longer just a dry procedural event. It becomes a statement of professional pride. A little polished monument to the idea that depression only counts if it incapacitates in a manner legible to people who have likely never had to live inside it.
That is why this deserves contempt.
Jurisdictional Rigour, My Arse
Chambers calls the result a reinforcement of jurisdictional rigour.
Of course it does. That is the language these places always reach for when technical severity needs to sound noble. Rigour. Boundaries. Discipline. Clarity. The whole fragrant bouquet of respectable procedural violence.
But there is nothing especially noble about a system that still seems to struggle with the idea that mentally ill people are not required to become wholly incoherent before their condition is allowed serious weight. The law loves clean categories. Human minds do not.
A claimant being able to articulate something in the interim is not some magic anti-depression certificate. It may simply mean they were surviving in fragments. Performing coherence in bursts. Forcing administrative function through a damaged system. Plenty of ill people do exactly that. Then collapse elsewhere. That is how real life works.
The tribunal world too often seems to demand theatrical helplessness before it will concede ordinary psychological impairment. That is not sophistication. That is barbarism in formal shoes.
Another Lesson In What The System Rewards
So yes, St Philips can have its little victory lap. Wendy Miller can have another marketed success. The administrators are not employers. The claim is out of time. Fine.
But what the write-up really advertises is something uglier.
It advertises a legal culture still perfectly willing to treat continued coherence as a reason to strip depression of force. It advertises a world in which chambers can publicly celebrate that logic without embarrassment. It advertises a system that still seems more comfortable with technical pruning than with messy human reality.
And that is why this is worth dragging into the light.
Because the message to depressed claimants is as old and filthy as ever: if you can still speak, write, explain yourself or function intermittently, do not expect much mercy. The machine may simply decide you were well enough all along.
Medieval stuff.
Only now it comes with a press release.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project