I found one of their solicitors, Russell Parkes, to be untrustworthy with traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I felt taken advantage of. I experienced a lot of confusion and emotional turmoil because I didn’t know what was going on.

Gledhill Gill Solicitors wouldn’t speak to me when I asked if how Russell works is going to change. They said it was because he was with Heringtons Solicitors when I was a client of his. They asked me not to email them again as they didn’t intend to reply.

Heringtons Solicitors stated that they noted what I’d said, but couldn’t comment further as Russell is no longer associated with their firm.

The Safeguarding Adults Board asked me to explain what happened so that they could come to a decision about whether they would need to take action in case other people could be impacted in the same way that I was. They then decided it wasn’t their role to investigate a solicitor’s conduct after all.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority didn’t think it could be proven that Russell abused his position or intended to manipulate me. I don’t understand why they can’t advise a solicitor against doing something that he doesn’t even need to be doing in the first place considering that it’s not his job, but I’m told it’s not the role of the SRA to ask Russell to stop having personal correspondences with his mental health clients after the tribunal.

Nobody wants to put any boundaries in place.

I also had some communication problems with the SRA complaints officer which took a few months to resolve. He wasn’t always making sense, and when I would log in to my email account I kept being informed that unusual activity had been detected on my account. It made me wonder if someone had been intercepting our emails. I wrote a letter to the SRA asking if someone else could deal with the complaint by letter instead. They replied to say that they considered the complaints officer to have communicated clearly, and their decision to take no further action would remain the same.

A couple of months later when my support worker called the SRA on my behalf, we were informed that they have no record on their database of the name of the person who answered my letter. Then a few weeks later we were able to speak on the phone with the complaints officer who had been dealing with my case, and it turned out that the communication problems had just been a miscommunication of sorts. However, I’m finding it difficult to understand how he could have communicated so incoherently unless it had been intentional, so I think we just got played. The complications, and the difficulty in getting the complaints officer to simply explain himself when I asked him to, have left me with the feeling that something hasn’t quite been adding up.

Due to the embarrassment, to other stuff going on in my life, and to not coping very well in general, it has already taken me about 6 years to get this far, and it doesn’t feel like anyone has been particularly helpful. It’s been an emotional strain to say the least. Thank you for listening.