Depression takes a heavy toll on lawyers
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Suvor |
Daniel Suvor thinks he has the right idea. Early on, remove the stigma of
mental health treatment for lawyers — who suffer the most depression
of any profession — and they may be able to avoid the total breakdown
or career nosedive that harms them and others.
As one of his priorities as chair of the ABA’s Law Student Division,
Suvor, a third-year student at George Washington University Law School, had
March 27 declared National Mental Health Day at law schools across the country
to increase awareness of law student mental health issues. The division is
providing a toolkit on the ABA Web site about signs and symptoms of depression
and anxiety as well as ideas for stress reduction.
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Carlton |
Richard Carlton, deputy director of the State Bar of California’s Lawyer
Assistance Program (LAP), the voluntary program that offers aid to attorneys
with substance abuse or mental health problems, is all for tackling depression
early. “I think it’s an excellent idea,” he says of the Mental
Health Day. “The idea is not to wait until the harm is done, but to intervene
on the front end,” adds Janis Thibault, director of LAP, who wants lawyers
to avail themselves of LAP services at the first sign of distress.
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Thibault |
According to a Johns Hopkins University study, lawyers suffer the highest
rate of depression among workers in 104 occupations. A University of Washington
study found that 19 percent of lawyers suffered depression compared to 3 percent
to 9 percent in the general population. And a University of Arizona study of
law students found that they suffer eight to 15 times the anxiety, hostility
and depression of the general population.
“There’s something about the practice of law that attracts a certain
personality that is prone to experiencing these problems,” says Carlton. “They’re
very intelligent, very driven to succeed — accomplished people.”
“There’s a bit of all or nothing,” adds Thibault. “If
you don’t win, you lose. Most professions don’t experience that
extreme . . . I’ve never seen such a lonely profession — the inability
to connect with other people at a deep level because there’s so much
of an adversarial relationship. The profession in a lot of ways makes it very
difficult to build trust.”
At the same time, driven attorneys are the very people who are reluctant to
seek treatment — if they get to the point of admitting they have a problem
at all. “You’re the warrior when you go into the courtroom,” says
Tim Willison, a licensed clinical therapist who is one of nine LAP group facilitators
from throughout the state. “Emotional stuff is seen as a weakness.”
That emphasis on the thinking part of the brain does wonders in the courtroom
and in parsing and analyzing legal issues. “There’s an absolute
need to keep feelings in check, especially if they’re litigating,” Willison
says. But it can take a toll elsewhere, and anger often becomes the dominant
emotion. “For everybody, part of mental health is being able to process
feelings. Everybody needs to be able to use their head and their heart.”
Willison, whose LAP territory covers San Francisco, Sacramento and Davis,
says lawyers who come to him with depression are typically in their 40s and
50s because the pressures have built up to the boiling point by then. “It’s
cumulative,” he says. When the lawyers walk in his door, he sees the
telltale signs: fatigue, low energy, a sense of being overwhelmed. At home
or in the office, “there’s creeping paralysis.”
Willison described some typical symptoms:
They may have come to the point where they can’t bear to open another
envelope from the State Bar, and those unopened envelopes are piling up in
a drawer somewhere. They don’t feel they can deal with one more demand
from a client. They can’t answer the phone. If they’re at the beach
on a beautiful, sunny day, it’s “So what?” They can’t
experience pleasure. Nothing is fun. They may have trouble sleeping. There
may have been a change in appetite.
And Willison says he doesn’t know how anybody could be happy working
80 to 90 pressure-filled hours a week. “It’s a set-up,” he
says, and it’s particularly hard on solo practitioners, who besides working
the long hours, do it in isolation and also take on every job in the office,
from making copies to filing papers at the courthouse. “I think you have
to work at finding a way at practicing law that is balanced.”
Treatment may include private therapy and medication and is increasingly including
meditation. Carlton and Willison believe the biggest help is the group support
even though, as Willison points out, the initial reaction from a lawyer to
group support is often incredulous: “‘You want me to sit in a room
full of attorneys and you tell me that’s going to help?’ I have
to offer some reassurance.”
But once they join the groups, which usually have more men and typically meet
once a week, participants realize that they are not alone. “There’s
an enormous sense of relief when they find out they’re not the only one,” says
Willison. “They’ll be out there pretending it’s OK and feel
they’re the only broken soldier.”
According to a 2006 LAP report, 27 percent of program participants suffer
from substance abuse, 37 percent have mental health issues and 36 percent have
a dual diagnosis.
A 2002 study by Florida State University law professor Lawrence Krieger and
Missouri-Columbia psychology professor Kennon Sheldon found that the most dissatisfied
law students were also the ones who had lost sight of such intrinsic values
and rewards as personal growth and contribution to the community. Krieger also
wrote the advice handbook being promoted by the ABA Law Student division. “Scientific
research for the past 15 years has consistently shown that a primary focus
on external rewards and results, including affluence, fame and power, is unfulfilling,” Krieger
wrote.
“These values are seductive — they create a nice picture of life
but they are actually correlated with relative unhappiness. Instead, people
who have a more ‘intrinsic’ personal/ interpersonal focus — on
personal growth, close relationships, helping others or improving their community — turn
out to be significantly happier and more satisfied with their lives . . . Research
shows that there are only two motivations for choosing work (or other actions)
that will promote your life satisfaction: you inherently enjoy the process
of doing that work or the work supports a fundamental value or makes a higher
goal possible.”
Susan Daicoff, professor at Florida Coastal School of Law and author of Lawyer,
Know Thyself, believes that lawyers may be able to learn something from Krieger’s
work. Studies have found a strong correlation between job dissatisfaction and
psychological distress in lawyers, but from research she has conducted and
read, she does not believe it can be concluded that these people were ill-suited
to law in the first place. In fact, she says, their dissatisfaction may reflect
dissatisfaction by clients and society as a whole in the way lawyers perform.
For example, says Daicoff, it may be in clients’ best interest to try
to bring families together, but neither law school nor the legal profession
consider that an important consideration. Lawyers stick to precedent and fairness — “If
we had this situation last week, we should treat it the same way this week” — when
both they and their client might be better off if they could take an “ethic
of care” approach that looks at the whole situation and considers numerous
options. In other words, lawyers could get back to the intrinsic values that
Krieger talks of and make their work more satisfying to both themselves and
their clients.
It’s possible that lawyers dissatisfied with their profession “are
seeing some changes we need to make,” says Daicoff. “Maybe we need
to respond to the criticisms.”
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