law school Archives - Lawyers With Depression

Depression’s Negative Thinking

Years ago, when I had just been told I had something called “depression,” I was having a tough time accepting it – after all, I was a litigator, a good-slinger extraordinaire. The only thing that I thought could bring me down was a lucky pistol shot at High Noon.

During a talk with my therapist in the beginning of my recovery a decade ago, I told him all the negative thoughts I was having about my life. My counselor, a large, white -bearded older man with an Obi Wan Kenobi-like aura, gently told me, “Dan that is depression talking.” Somehow that got through to me; somehow I knew it was true.

My counselor, pillar of Jedi knowledge that he was, had helped me look through a sort of psychic telescope into the constellation that was my patterns of depressive thinking. All people who have struggled with depression must do combat with their negative thoughts. They must – usually with a therapist’s help – begin to see that THEY are thinking these thoughts and they’re not just HAPPENING to them.

Negative Thoughts – and Lots of Them

It has been estimated that we have anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 thoughts a day. If your ideas about life are predominantly downbeat, imagine how many negative thoughts you are generating daily—thousands upon thousands.

In the magazine Psychology Today, Hara Estroff Marano writes:

“One of the features of depression is pessimistic thinking. The negative thinking is actually the depression speaking. It’s what depression sounds like. Depression in fact manifests in negative thinking before it creates negative affect. Most depressed people are not aware that the despair and hopelessness they feel are flowing from their negative thoughts. Thoughts are mistakenly seen as privileged, occupying a rarefied territory, immune to being affected by mood and feelings, and therefore representing some immutable truth.

Compounding the matter is that negative thinking slips into the brain under the radar of conscious awareness and becomes one of the strongest of habit patterns. People generate negative thoughts so automatically they are unaware that it is happening; that it is actually a choice they are making.”

Lawyers are particularly prone to this type of pessimistic thinking which helps explain why their rates of depression are about twice that – twenty percent – of the general population.

In recent article in The Wall Street Journal wrote about this very topic:

“Martin E. P. Seligman, a psychologist and proponent of ‘positive psychology,’ observes that lawyers experience depression at rates that are 3.6 times as high as that of other employed people. They also abuse alcohol and illegal drugs at rates above what’s seen in non-lawyers. Why is this? In part, he says, the law selects people with a glass-half-empty attitude. His research has found that people who score low on an optimism test do better in law school. ‘Pessimism, he writes, ‘is seen as a plus among lawyers, because seeing troubles as pervasive and permanent is a component of what the law profession deems prudence.

A prudent perspective enables a good lawyer to see every conceivable snare and catastrophe that might occur in any transaction. The ability to anticipate the whole range of problems and betrayals that non-lawyers are blind to is highly adaptive for the practicing lawyer who can, by so doing, help his clients defend against these far-fetched eventualities. If you don’t have this prudence to begin with, law school will seek to teach it to you. Unfortunately, though, a trait that makes you good at your profession does not always make you a happy human being’’.

The Big Ten

For us to start making different choices about what kind of thoughts we think, it’s important to see the patterns, the way these false thought patters take place over and over again. Here are some examples of depressive thinking:

1. False extremes – “the tendency to evaluate [one’s own] personal qualities in extreme, black-and-white categories; shades of gray do not exist.”

2. False generalization – “after experiencing one unpleasant event, we conclude that the same thing will happen to us again and again.”

3. False filter – “we tend to pick out the negative in every situation and think about it alone, to the exclusion of everything else.”

4. False transformation – “we transform neutral or positive experiences into negative ones.”

5. False mind-reading – “we may think we can tell what someone is thinking about us, that the person hates us or views us as stupid. But such negative conclusions usually are not supported by the facts.”

6. False fortune-telling – “we expect catastrophe and the expectation itself produces hopelessness and helplessness.”

7. False lens – “we view our fears, errors, or mistakes through a magnifying glass and deduce catastrophic consequences. Everything then is out of proportion.”

8. False feelings-based reasoning – depressed persons “tend to take their emotions as the truth. They let their feelings determine the facts.”

9. False “shoulds” – “Our lives may be dominated by ‘shoulds’ or ‘oughts,’ applied to ourselves or others. This heaps pressure on us and others to reach unattainable standards.”

10. False responsibility – “when we assume responsibility and blame ourselves for a negative outcome, even when there is no basis for this.”

A common theme running through much of this type of thinking is a self-judgment of inadequacy and, as a result, the depressed person notices negative, misfortunate circumstances but ignores positive, fortunate circumstances.

Overachievers and perfectionist that they are, depressed lawyers may frequently receive positive feedback concerning his or her performance at work. For example, a depressed lawyer may have a caseload of one hundred cases. He might have the upper hand on 90%, but struggles with the 10%. This lawyer sees his struggle with the handful of cases as confirming what a loser he or she is, incompetent and unable to keep up “like everyone else.” The many positive comments made by colleagues or staff are not even remembered.

Because of the belief that he or she is inadequate, and his or her tendency to only notice negative experiences, the future is viewed as certain to be gloomy, dismal, and painful: “I’ll never make partner,” “I suck as a lawyer.”

Negative thinking sounds, to the outside observer, to be obviously false or negatively skewed. If so, just why do depressives repeatedly think like this over and over again? Are they idiots?

No, it’s because depressive thinking is “automatic.” It is not the result of thinking the situation through objectively – ironically enough, something lawyers are trained to do.

It just happens rapidly without any reflection.

So it’s the event itself that is sad, not life in general. And even if this thought or feeling arises, it is only temporary.

Depressive thinking leads to depression, leads to depressive thinking, leads to. . .

As we explain these thinking styles you will see how each helps to maintain depression, by altering how we perceive reality.

It’s these thinking styles that make it so hard to see an end to the depression, as they limit our possibilities of thought. Once these patterns take hold, the emotional arousal they cause begins to affect us physically.

If you are thinking now “Yeah, but you don’t know my life” – remember: there is nothing so awful that you can imagine that someone somewhere hasn’t survived without becoming depressed.

It is not your fault if you are depressed, but there are concrete, effective things you can do about it.

How to Kick Negative Thinking’s Butt

Again, Estroff Marrano offers some ways to combat negative thoughts:

Distract yourself. Engaging, pleasant activities, such as exercise or hanging out with friends, are best. Once you are feeling more positive, you will be better able to solve problems.
Stop that train of thought. Think or even tell yourself “Stop!” or “No!” when you start to ruminate.
Write it down. Tracking your ruminative thoughts in a journal can help you overcome depression by organizing those thoughts and relieving yourself of their burden.
Solve a problem. Even taking a small step toward solving one problem that is weighing you down will help with overcoming depression. Data show a strong link between goals you cannot achieve and depression-inducing ruminative thinking, so start problem solving.
Identify triggers. Figure out which places, times, situations, or people are most likely to cause a bout of rumination, and find ways to avoid those triggers or manage them better. Mornings and evenings are the times when ruminative thinking is most likely.
Meditate. Mindfulness techniques can help you get some distance from the thoughts that trouble you, while at the same time reducing stress.
Stop linking small goals to big goals. For example, you may need to challenge a belief that achieving big goals (such as happiness) completely depends on succeeding at smaller goals (such as losing five pounds).
Get therapy. Seek cognitive therapy techniques to help you question your thoughts and find alternative ways of viewing your situation.

Try, day by day, to chip away at the conclusion that depression just happens to you, or that it’s just a disease. Try to remember, that whatever it’s causes, negative thinking is a powerful fuel to help it arise and keep it going. Think about it.

In the Beginning – Depression in Law School

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that something catastropic has occurred in the psychic landscape – Leonard Cohen

Everything has its beginning: the Cosmic Bang, the French Revolution and depression in the legal profession.

There is little doubt that for many, depression begins in law school. One study of law students found they suffered from depression at the same rate as the general population before entering law school. Just two months into the school year, however, their negative symptom levels had increased dramatically. By the spring of their first year, 32% of the same law students were depressed. By the spring of their third year, the number had risen to 40%. Two years after graduation, 17% of the students – about twice the rate of depression experienced by the general population – were still depressed. Such elevated levels of depression have been corroborated by later studies.

Plug in these stats and an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 of this country’s 150,000 law students struggle with depression at some point during their law school experience

Andy Benjamin, J.D., Ph.D., the lead researcher in the above study and others that have looked at law student and lawyer depression, wrote me last summer:

“Since the publication of our research about law student and lawyer depression, depression still runs rife for law students and practicing attorneys – nearly a third of all law students and lawyers suffer from depression. The data to support this statement have been published since the early eighties when the studies were first conducted. Several subsequent empirical studies have corroborated the grim findings up until 2010. As the stress, competition, and adversarial nature of the profession have continued to take their toll, not surprisingly, the rates of depression have not changed. Law students and lawyers remain at the greatest risk for succumbing to depression, more so for any other profession. After nearly forty years of compelling evidence about the prevalence of the severity of depression for the legal profession of law, more meaningful systematic changes must be implemented throughout the professional acculturation process of law students and lawyers.”

It’s difficult for the legal establishment to face all of this. William M. Treanor, immediate past dean of Fordham Law School, told The New York Law Journal last year: “Depression is a very important issue that often gets swept to the side. It’s a real concern and a problem in the legal profession. Studies indicate that it is common among law students and common among lawyers. Given that, it’s important to try to figure out ways to combat it and to let people know if they are suffering, they are not alone.”

As author Kathleen Norris wrote, “The religion of America is optimism and denial.” We’re a nation of suck-it-uppers; a people who drive their inner pain deeper and deeper into themselves until they break. The denial of depression in the law is both institutional and individual.

In Institutional Denial About the Dark Side of Law School, Florida State University Law Professor Lawrence Krieger wrote:

“There is a wealth of which should be alarming information about the collective distress and unhappiness of our [law] students and the lawyers they become. We appear to be practicing a sort of organizational denial because, given this information, it is remarkable that we are not openly addressing these problems among ourselves at faculty meetings, and in committees and without students in the context of courses and extracurricular programs. The negative phenomena we ignore are visible to most of us and are confirmed by essentially unrebutted empirical evidence.”

Attorney Andrew Sparkler, a friend of then fellow Fordham law student David Nee who suffered from depression (unbeknownst to his friends) and committed suicide in his third year of law school, observed, “To admit that you are depressed [in law school], to yourself or to others . . . , is a weakness and if you’re in a shark tank of hyper-aggressive folks around you, you’d be hesitant to expose it because why would you fess up to anyone that you have a problem?” Sparkler, his friends and the Nee family started the Dave Nee Foundation to address law student depression and suicide.

It doesn’t get much better when one graduates and enters the job market. A John Hopkins study looked at 104 occupations to determine which ones had the highest incidence of depression. Lawyers topped the list and were found to suffer from depression at a rate of 3.6 times that of other profession studies. Other studies have found that about 20 percent of all lawyers struggle with depression.

Plug in these stats and an estimated 200,000 of this country’s 1 million lawyers are hurting.

Obviously, something is really rotten in Denmark.

There have been several theories bantered about as to why law students suffer from such high rates of depression: pessimistic thinking styles taught in law school (“learning to think like a lawyer”), personality types that go to law school, a breakdown in inner values and the current nasty economy and stress to find and maintain a good job. The New York Times recently ran an article, No Longer Their Golden Ticket, – I was interviewed for this one – which spoke about the stress and uncertainty that law school students’ face:

“[The] days of [high pay and full employment] are over. As the profession lurches through the worst economic slump in decades, with jobs and bonuses cut and the internal pressures to perform rising, associates do not just feel as if they are diving into the deep end, but rather, drowning.”

However, there has been pushback against the theory that law school even causes much psychic damage.

In an article by University at Michigan Law Professor James Justesen White, Maiming the Cubs, he takes issue with Professor Krieger theory and argues that the law school experience does not “. . . cause permanent and irreversible change and that the ills of lawyers cannot be traced in any meaningful way to the stresses of the three years in law school.” He concludes:

“I wonder, too, whether the anxiety and depression that we observe in some of our law students is the unavoidable consequence of the challenge of hard learning and of confronting the looming need to prepare to behave like a lawyer. Soon after they come to law school, students must sense that however hard Contracts and Torts is, learning to be a successful practicing lawyer is harder, and that the road to success in the profession is even less clearly marked than the road to law school success.”

Sorry, I just don’t agree.

My take on law school depression

I think we must look at what makes people more vulnerable to depression before they enter law school – those 10% who already have depression or are at risk for developing it before they register for their first 1L class. For most, there is a genetic or family history of depression. Likewise, there is a history of family dysfunction: for example, alcoholism, physical and emotional abuse and/or neglect. These folks bring those major risk factors into law school. It is my view that law school doesn’t cause depression; rather, it may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for those who already have some risk for it.

Pessimistic thinking and persistent stress , both powerful dynamics in law school, are known triggers for depression. When these influences are mixed in with other pre-law school risk factors, law school creates a “perfect storm” for depression to happen.

We tend to mix up law student unhappiness and dissatisfaction with depression.

They’re not the same thing; not even close. Unhappiness and discontent are relatively transitory; other emotions aren’t pushed to the margins or extinguished. We are adaptable in response to our environment. We might feel stressed or exasperated by the law school grind, but everyone bumps up and down throughout their days. We deal with our stress and balance ourselves out either with exercise, socializing or just by having stress resilient genes. Not so with depression. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., in his best-selling book, Undoing Depression, writes:

“We confuse depression, sadness, and grief. But the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality—the ability to experience a full range of emotion, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief. Depression is not an emotion itself. It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness. When we feel our worst, sad, self-absorbed, and helpless, we are experiencing what people with depression experience, but they don’t recover from those moods without help.”

There is also a biochemical poverty about depression; the scarcity of neurochemicals like serotonin and dopamine that wreck havoc in our brains and set the stage for depression. As I wrote in Trial magazine about the connection between stress, anxiety and depression, the grind isn’t just about long hours in the office or law library cubicle, but the grinding up of our nervous systems.

We have a sense that such a lifestyle can be problematic to our happiness, but we’re willing to keep marching to that beat in the hope of later rewards (e.g. money, security, partnership). Yet, I can’t help but think that we’re dimly aware, if at all, of the risk we put ourselves in for major depression.

Besides the psychological-physiological links to depression, we live in a culture that breeds melancholy. How could this not eek its way into the law school experience?

Maybe it’s the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of our times; the torpor of the imagination which fails to inspire our young people to live an engaged and spirited life in the law, or the cynicism to think that such a life is even possible that worries me. Or, by the time young people get to law school, they’re so jaded by our consumer driven culture they just want the diploma to start making the big bucks. All of this contributes to depression, to a lonely society that undermines what it means to live a decent, healthy and happy life.

In 2008 the American Bar Association launched a Mental Health Initiative to address mental health problems on law school campuses. See the Mental Health Toolkit for Student Bar Organizations and Administrators distributed as part of this effort. Such initiatives’ involve mental health days (e.g. check out Marquette Law School) where they had out a document from Professor Krieger called The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress , “wellness” web pages on law school websites (e.g. check out the one at Harvard Law School) and referrals to a school’s counseling center (e.g. check out Cornell Law School).

While laudable, they’re an arm’s length effort to confronting such a deeply personal and painful human experience. Moreover, it seems like any presentation on the issue of depression in law schools is limited to first year orientation. What about the second and third year students? Studies conclude that depression rates continue to rise into the second and third year. If that’s true, what is being done to help these students? Another query: Just how many of the people who speak at these programs are law students or lawyers who actually had or are currently suffering from depression and disclose it? My hunch is few, if any.

Why should that matter? Because the students need to hear it straight-up. They need to listen to someone in the trenches of a profession they’ll soon be entering. Without such depression experiences, a speaker is like someone trying to enlighten someone about the dangers of smoking and cancer, but has never smoked. Wouldn’t it be a more powerful, credible and informative experience for students to listen to a law student and/or a practicing lawyer, who has depression and is willing to talk about it?

Instead, students are served up programs, usually offered up by well-meaning Dean or Vice-Deans of Student Affairs and therapists from a University’s Counseling Center. There’s a lump-it-all-together approach to it all. I was asked a few years back, when I was just beginning my advocacy work, to give a brief, 15 minute talk on depression. The school trotted out a variety of people in fifteen minute increments to talk about stress, drinking, drugging and, eventually, depression. Speaking in that big first year classroom, I was reminded of the ancient Greek amphitheaters. Many of the Greek dramas were tragedies. And make no doubt about it, depression is a tragedy.

I was saddened by the whole charade, the paucity of imagination and effort that went into addressing such a critical problem; the let’s pool this list of mental ills together into a small program on “mental health.” I sensed that the students failed to see how any of this was connected to them. The sliver of time allocated to depression couldn’t help but leave the students with the impression that the school really didn’t take the problem that seriously.

Over 130 million people suffer from depression worldwide on a planet where it is the leading cause of disability. In our country, it’s also the leading cause of disability and some 20 million people are afflicted. It’s been characterized as an “epidemic.” If that’s true, what does that say about the higher rates of law student and lawyer depression? Just what adjective could one use to describe the scope of the problem?

Addressing Depression In Law School – Really

Here’s what can be done right now:

1. Law Schools – show the thirty minute documentary, “A Terrible Melancholy: Depression in the Legal Profession.” Copies of the film on DVD are available form the Erie County Bar Associaiton. Here’s a trailer clip of this recently finished film:

2. Have someone come in to speak to the students that are in the legal profession who has suffered from depression to reach these students. Give it more than 15 minutes of your time and have programs for second and third year student on this critical topic.

3. Law Students – show up, watch the film and think long and hard about it.

Finally, I want to urge all of you reading this blog to write in and express your views about your law school experience, whether you’re in school now or it’s been thirty years. There’s much to be gained by such sharing. Please write.

The Triumph of the Human Spirit – Folks Dealing with Depression

A hero is an ordinary person who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles – Christopher Reeve.

I want to tell others about all the remarkable people I’ve known who’ve struggled with depression. While they’re not paladins that ride into medieval battle swinging swords atop snorting mares, they fight a different kind of battle. And one no less heroic.

Many of the best people I’ve been privileged to know struggle with depression every day. While they don’t have shiny medals pinned on their lapels, there is an unmistakable strength in them – even if they don’t see it. I know it’s real because I see and feel it – just like when I am in a grove of giant and majestic pines during a walk in the forest that must withstand the fury of a winter’s storm in January.

A Hero Steps Forward

Take Bob Antonioni. Bob’s story appeared in Esperanza magazine’s regular column, “Everyday Heroes”. He had a budding political career in the Massachusetts State Senate and a law practice. Despite holding such a public position, Bob took the courageous step to disclose that he suffered from clinical depression in the hope of letting others know it was okay – there wasn’t anything to be ashamed of:

“Telling his story has become another tool to chip away at stigma. Yet he remembers his trepidation when he disclosed the truth in a November 2003 interview with a local newspaper.
‘I had misgivings,’ he admits, ‘but I guess I didn’t give people enough credit. All I heard were thank yous —the complete opposite of what I expected.’ In fact, Antonioni was re-elected twice after that. He retired from public office in 2009 to have more time for himself and his family, but continues to practice law and pursue his advocacy work.”

To me, it says something wonderful about the human spirit that against such a formidable foe as depression, people keep fighting to get better. And many triumph. Just like Bob.

The Black Dog

A few weeks ago in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, there was a great piece, Ill to Power. The article was about Winston Churchill’s life-long battle with depression written by the author of the new book, A First-rate Madness. Here, he describes Churchill’s struggles:

“There is no doubt that he had severe periods of depression; he was open about it – calling it, following Samuel Johnson, his ‘Black Dog.’ Apparently his most severe bout of depression came in 1910, when he was, at about age 35, Home Secretary. Later in his life, he told his doctor, ‘For two or three years the light faded from the picture. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me.’ He had thoughts of killing himself. ‘I don’t like standing near the edge of the platform when an express train is passing through’.”

Like Churchill, Abraham Lincoln struggled with major bouts of depression. In the book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Fueled a President to Greatness, Lincoln writes about a cloud over him that every bit matches Churchill’s darkness:

“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were felt by the whole human race, there would not be one cheerful face left on earth”.

Lincoln, who many say was one of this country’s greatest heroes, apparently did not feel like one all the time.

Hard to Feel Like a Hero

Most people depression — in some fundamental sense –feel broken. This conclusion is fueled by the depression itself – both biological (sleep, appetite, energy levels) and psychological (e.g. “Nobody really cares about me”, “I stink at my job” or “My depression will never end”). But this brokenness isn’t just an “inside job” – crummy stuff they tell themselves about themselves. Other people or events in a depressive’s daily orbit serve-up damaging assessments and innuendos about a depressed person’s behavior or personhood.

Others may tell them that they are letting them down at the office or not contributing enough to family responsibilities – yes, loved ones can get fed up with the depressed person’s withdrawal from the family, the inability to do chores he/she used to do and the depressed person’s sourpuss. Or, they deny the immensity of the suffering of the depressive by minimizing it: “Don’t worry, things will get better. You’re just in a slump.”

We sense that their agenda isn’t so much about helping us get better, as it is about them their needs. Why else would we feel so much crappier and lonely after such exchanges? It isn’t as if their needs aren’t important, but shouldn’t our mental health be at least as important?

Then there is the cultural stigma – a cloud of ignorance, fear and misunderstanding – surrounding depression. American culture tends to see depression as a moral or personal weakness; the “just-get-over-it” rants of a society that likes simplistic answers to complicated problems. Dr. Richard O’Connor, in his book Undoing Depression, captures some the irony of how our society sees depression as different from – or maybe not as real as — other forms of illness:

“Where’s the big national foundation leading the battle against depression? Where is the Jerry Lewis Telethon and the Annual Run for Depression? Little black ribbons for everyone to wear? The obvious answer is the stigma associated with the disease. Too much of the public still views depression as a weakness or character flaw, and thinks we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

And all the hype about new antidepressant medications has only made things worse by suggesting that recovery is simply a matter of taking a pill. Too many people with depression take the same attitude; we are ashamed of and embarrassed by having depression. This is the cruelest part of the disease: we blame ourselves for being weak or lacking character instead of accepting that we have an illness, instead of realizing that our self-blame is a symptom of the disease. And feeling that way, we don’t step forward and challenge unthinking people who reinforce those negative stereotypes. So we stay hidden away, feeling miserable and yourselves for ourselves for our own misery”.

Renaming One’s Walk through Depression as Heroic

Why can’t we re-imagine our self-image in relationship to our depression in a more positive light? Why can’t we think of our battles with depression as, in fact, heroic? Instead of counting all of times that depression has gotten the better of us and knocked us to our knees, how about giving ourselves credit for all of the times that we have triumphed over depression (perhaps even in the simplest ways); the times that we have risen to the occasion in spite of our melancholy and the moments that we have looked depression in the eye and said, “no more.” Make no mistake about it that takes gumption – lots of it! And I’ve witnessed scores of people say “that’s enough.” While talking back to depression isn’t a panacea, it may be a healtier way for us to cope rather than succumb to it.

Viewing yourself as a hero is a constructive and healing experience for people with depression. It doesn’t deny that we struggle with it sometimes, but it more importantly doesn’t deny the power we actually do have over it and the courage it takes to deal with it to the best of our ability each day.

In his article “The Continuing Stigma of Depression” psychologist Jonathan Rottenberg writes about the stigma for those who have recovered from depression:

“My hunch is that the disease/defect model of depression, is unwittingly contributing to the ongoing stigma of depression. Through the lens of the disease model, the legions of the formerly depressed are a “broken” people who need lifelong assistance. I would like to see a more revolutionary public education approach, with campaigns that emphasize the unique strengths that are required to endure depression. Even if a person is helped by drugs or therapy, grappling with a severe depression requires enormous courage. In many ways, a person who has emerged from the grip of depression has just passed the most severe of trials in the human experience. If we acknowledge that surviving depression requires a special toughness, we will not see formerly depressed people as a broken legion, but as a resource who can teach us all something about overcoming adversity”.

Things to Consider

– Maybe we fall down 30 times a day, or maybe it’s just a stumble, but we have to regain our balance and get up. As the old Zen saying goes, “fall down seven times — get up eight.” That, my friends, is heroic. Just remember that when you fall and get up – YOU are that hero.

– We must remember that when we are in a depression, it isn’t easy to feel like a hero — just think of Honest Abe. But the depression will pass. So don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t feel heroic all the time.

– We should not condemn ourselves when we are down, but pick ourselves up and remember that we are, truly, remarkable people.

As writer Andrew Berstein once wrote: “A hero has faced it all: he/she need not be undefeated, but he/she must be undaunted.”

Our Struggle with Depression

Everyone has had a taste of what depression feels like. Everyone feels the blues at times. Sadness, disappointment, fatigue are normal parts of life. There is a connection between the blues and clinical depression, but the difference is like the difference between the sniffles and pneumonia – Richard O’Connor, Ph.D.

Years ago: I am walking down a Manhattan street on a grey day. I am feeling so sad; beyond somber and without any external point of reference. I looked up at the grey buildings. I suddenly have the sense that I am a building; a tower with a cracked foundation slowly falling to the pavement below.

I step into a church I don’t know. I try to pull myself together. “Please God. I need your help.” I have to be in Court shortly. I look at my watch. My suit feels tight against my skin. I struggle to make the sadness more manageable, more contained. I leave because I must, not because I feel any better; but because I am an adult and have to move through my day, no matter the volume of pain ringing in my ears.

The sadness from that day would end. I would feel better. But a pattern was developing, even then. A pattern of how I would respond to sadness in my life, both past and present.

The Struggle to Break Free

Some folks have given up hope that depression will ever leave them alone. They’re just hoping for more good days than bad. When it’s a relatively good day, when life is in flow and not stuck in the muck of melancholy, there is happiness, or perhaps, relief. The depression gods’ hurtiling thunderbolts have missed them this day. But when they’re in the thick of it, they fight their sadness. It’s as if they’re pressing on the gas trying to escape their pain while depression has its foot on the brake.

Sadness is not Depression – though they are cousins

First, let’s be clear: sadness is not depression, but it may manifest as persistent sadness that can be a symptom of clinical depression. When I developed depression ten years ago, my sadness was accompanied by lots of crying for no particular reason.

Paradoxically, Dr. O’Connor, in his book, Undoing Depression , wrote that depression is often the absence of despondency:

“We confuse depression, sadness, and grief. However, the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality – the ability to experience the full range of emotions, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief. It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness.”

Maybe this is why we don’t see – we don’t see how we react to our own sadness because we’re stuck in the vortex of depression where everything, like the perimeter of a tornado, is thrown together.

This relationship between sadness is troublesome for a depressive. This is so not because there is anything wrong with sadness – it’s a normal part of the human experience and gives our lives depth and pitch. It’s the bass tone you hear when B.B. King plays the Blues. In my experience, sadness has a bittersweet quality to it. As the great novelist Herman Hesse once penned, “It was if all of the happiness, all of magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flown away, becoming temporary and temporary once more.”

The Brain Knows How we React to Sadness

A recent study revealed that the brain’s response to sadness can predict a relapse into depression. Faced with sadness, the relapsing patients showed more activity in a frontal region of the brain, known as the medial prefrontal gyrus. These responses were linked to higher rumination: the tendency to think obsessively about negative events. Patients who didn’t relapse showed more activity in the rear part of the brain, which is responsible for processing visual information and is linked to greater feelings of self-acceptance and non-judgment of experience.

According to Norman Farb, Ph.D., who did the study: “For a person with a history of depression, using the frontal brain’s ability to analyze and interpret sadness may actually be an unhealthy reaction that can perpetuate the chronic cycle of depression. These at-risk individuals might be better served by trying to accept and notice their feelings rather than explain and analyze them.”

We keep trying to find the source of our sadness like squinting to find the bucket that has fallen in the deep well. We circumambulate the hole, peering into the darkness, but don’t see the flashlight nearby that can help. We can’t see that our attempt to break down and explain our sadness to ourselves isn’t helping – it’s hurting us.

A New Relationship to Our Sadness

In his book The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, Christopher Germer, Ph.D., writes:

“This is an opportunity to move from mental work to heart work. Self-compassion has a distinctly nonintellectual and non-effortful feel to it. If we can find ourselves in the midst of suffering and acknowledge the depth of our struggle, the heart begins to soften automatically. We stop trying to feel better and instead discover sympathy for ourselves. We stop trying to feel better and instead discover sympathy for ourselves. We start caring for ourselves because we’re suffering.”

Don’t always try to figure out your depression. Give yourself a breather from solving it, this boulder of sorrow. Instead, see that you – yes, you – are worthy of compassion from yourself because you suffer. If you don’t know how to feel this compassion for yourself, isn’t it about time to try?

How Stress and Anxiety Become Depression

Lawyers suffer from depression at an alarming rate. I am one of them.

I have been a litigator for more than 22 years, and I didn’t suffer depression in the beginning of my career. But I did have trouble managing the stress of my practice.

Over time, this constant stress developed into anxiety. I started feeling like I couldn’t control everything. I would go to bed fearing the problems and disasters to confront me the next morning. After years of this, the pendulum swung from states of anxiety to states of depression. Why did this happen? It took me a long time to understand.

Recently, scientists have been focusing on the connection between stress and anxiety and the role they play in triggering and maintaining depression. This is something that should be of concern to all lawyers, who carry high stress loads in their law practices.

Too Much Stress Can Lead to Anxiety

“Stress” is anything in our environment that knocks our bodies out of their homeostatic balance. Stress responses are the physiological adaptations that ultimately reestablish balance. Most of the time, our bodies do adapt, and a state of balance is restored. However, “if stress is chronic, repeated challenges may demand repeated bursts of vigilance,” warns Dr. Robert Sapolsky, an expert on stress-related illnesses and author of the best-selling book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress Related Diseases and Coping. “At some point, vigilance becomes over-generalized, leading us to conclude that we must always be on guard – even in the absence of stress. And thus the realm of anxiety is entered,” writes Sapolsky.

About 20% of the population will experience some form of anxiety disorder at least once in their lifetime. Studies show that law students and lawyers struggle with anxiety at twice that rate.

Anxiety and Depression

Stress went on too long in my life as a litigator. I had, indeed, entered the realm of anxiety. I felt like I had a coffee pot brewing 24/7 in my stomach. I became hypervigilant; each file on my desk was like a ticking time bomb about to go off. At some point, the anxiety made me dysfunctional, and I was unable to do as much as I had before. I felt ashamed of this. I denied it to myself and hid it from others, but the litigation mountain became harder and harder to climb as the anxiety persisted over a period of years.

Sapolsky writes, “If the chronic stress is insurmountable, it gives rise to helplessness. This response, like anxiety, can become generalized: A person can feel . . . at a loss, even in circumstances that [he or] she can actually master.” Helplessness is one pillar of a depressive disorder that becomes a major issue for lawyers because we think of ourselves as invulnerable superheroes who are the helpers, not the ones in need of help. Lawyers often don’t get help for their depression and feel ashamed if they do.

Many lawyers do not appreciate the connection between their stress and anxiety and their risk for developing clinical depression. But the occurrence of anxiety disorder with major depression is frequent; in fact, 60 percent of people with depression are also suffering from an anxiety disorder.

Maybe this connection helps explain studies that find such high rates of both anxiety and depression in the legal profession.

Depression “is stress that has gone on too long,” according to Dr. Richard O’Connor author of the book Undoing Perpetual Stress: The Missing Connection between Depression, Anxiety, and 21st Century Illness. Many people with depression have problems dealing with stress because they aren’t “stress resilient,” writes O’Connor. It’s not some central character flaw or weakness, but a complex interplay bewteen genetics and one’s experiences over a lifetime.

How our bodies and brains deal with stress and anxiety hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years. This wonderful defense mechanism, which is wired into our nervous system, is called the fight-or-flight response. When confronted with a threat – – whether real or perceived – – this response kicks in and initiates a sequence of nerve cell firing and chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol that flood into our bloodstream and propel us into action to meet a threat. This was an essential survival device for our ancestors who lived in the jungle and would have to flee beasts or fight foes trying to kill them.

Lawyers don’t fact these types of real life-or-death threats. But they perceive life-or-death threats in their battles with opposing counsel while sitting in a deposition or sparring in the courtroom. Our bodies respond as if we were being chased by a hungry lion. Accordingly, the stress response can be set in motion by mere anticipation, and when humans chronically believe that a homeostatic challenge is imminent, they develop anxiety.

Over time, this chronic anxiety causes the release of too much fight-or-flight hormones. Research has shown that prolonged release of too much cortisol damages areas of the brain that have been implicated in depression: the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory) and the amygdala (a fear processing hub deep in the brain). Another area of the brain, the cingulate (an emotion-dampening center located near the front of the brain), in tandem with the amygdala, helps set the stage for depression.

Lawyers need to learn better ways to deal with stress and anxiety to avoid the multiple triggers that can cause or exacerbate clinical depression. Turning and facing those things that make us stressed and anxious, and doing something about it, gives us the best protection against depression.

99 Things About Depression

Depression sucks.
You know this if you suffer from it.
You know this if you’ve suffered from it before.
If you have it, you’re not alone.
If you’re in the legal profession, you’re really, really not alone.
10% of Americans struggle with depression.
20% of lawyers struggle with depression.
Do the math – 200,000 out of 1 million lawyers have the big “D”.
Grad school is tough.
Apparently, tougher law students.
20 to 40% of law students will become depressed at some point.
Do more math – 30,000 to 60,000 out of the 150,000 law students.
Ok, ok, we get it. Depression is a BIG problem in the law.
I’ve felt lonely when I’ve been depressed.
I’ve been bone-tired when depressed, but couldn’t sleep.
People who struggle with depression are my heroes.
If there are so many depressed lawyers, why do they stay in the law?
Money? For sure, what else?
Status? Yes.
Very often, they’ve drifted into it.
But, maybe they’d be depressed in or out of the law. Maybe.
Many wonder, “What else could I do with a law degree?”
Not getting help? Not a good idea.
Getting help? Much better idea.
We are people who happen to be lawyers.
We’re not lawyers who happen to be people.
Remember this. Don’t forget it. Write it down someplace.
Depression changes your brain chemistry.
You may need medication. Maybe not.
You’ll need to talk to someone about it.
A friend? Good start. A therapist? Even better.
You’ll need to make changes in your life to get better.
And stay better.
What combination of changes those are different for everyone.
You can start to feel better.
I care about you even though I’ve never met you.
This is so because I’ve been there and understand.
You need to find people like this to talk to.
Be realistic – it might take a bit of time to feel better.
How long? Nobody really knows. Just keep going.
Some say, “I feel like killing myself”.
Don’t do that. Though, I understand why you might feel this way.
This painful impulse is depression talking – don’t listen.
Talk with a therapist about this pain – immediately – and listen to them.
Take a good look at how you see the world.
Take a good look at how you see yourself.
The Buddha once said, You are what you think.
Psychologists say that too.
True, but you’re more than just your thoughts.
You are a child of God, however you conceive of Him, Her or It.
You are precious beyond measure.
Exercise isn’t just about losing weight. It’s also about good brain chemistry.
Don’t listen to people who say “Toughen up.” Simple ignorance.
Don’t try to handle this by yourself.
It’s an illness. You’re not a bad, weak person.
Depression tends to run in families.
Your drinking too much might really be about depression.
It’s okay to be scared. There are millions of others who feel this way too.
There are different degrees of severity with depression.
Just like coffee at Starbucks – mild, medium and bold.
Depression isn’t just in our heads, it’s in our brains.
Does your job feel meaningless?
If so, it’s no surprise that you feel unhappy – maybe even depressed.
Chances are you didn’t have a healthy childhood if you have depression.
Many with depression didn’t.
“Nobody cares about me.” That’s depression talking.
What do you really want out of life?
Has anyone ever asked you that question? And really listened to your response?
Have you ever asked yourself that question? What would that life look like?
Most people with depression also have a problem with anxiety – about 60%
Are you just unhappy or depressed? Important question.
Maybe you’re both? You should talk to an expert.
Maybe the hardest part of depression is feeling hopeless.
Depression is a vicious circle.
We keep behaving in ways that keep us depressed.
We keep thinking in ways that keep us depressed.
As such, we keep getting depressed.
What’s your greatest passion in life?
Do you do enough of it? Why not?
Small children can be great antidepressants.
Serving others can be as well.
Depression isn’t just a sign of illness.
It is a sign that you need to change your life.
You need to educate yourself about what depression is.
You need to educate your significant other about it also.
A good book would help.
When you’re depressed, you don’t feel like doing anything.
That’s why you need to do things.
You can’t wait until you feel like doing things.
If depression had its way, you’d never feel like doing anything.
For most, depression isn’t happening all the time.
Pay attention to that.
Are there things, people that trigger it?
Are there things that help bring it down a notch?
I’m no expert.
I don’t have all the answers.
I hope I have a few.
Thanks for reading this.
Adios.

Rumination in the Legal Profession

There’s always a lot going on in my head.

But then again, there’s a lot of racket coming from yours too.

Lawyers think for a living, after all. There’s always the mental hum of marshaling the evidence, resolving conflicting LexisNexis opinions or assessing the climatic shifts in office politics and how it affects the pecking order. As advocates, we give a lot of deliberation to turning our analysis into persuasive locution. Lincoln, reflecting on his life as a trial lawyer, wrote, “When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.”

For lawyers with depression, there’s another kind of inner buzz. It’s called rumination.

We might be tempted to think of rumination as a form of worry, a rehashing of all the shit that can go wrong. But, it’s actually not. Worry focuses on potential bad events in the future.

Rumination, a cousin of fretful forecasting, is similar to worry except it focuses on bad feelings and experiences from the past.

According to book The Mindful Way through Depression,

“When we ruminate, we become fruitlessly preoccupied with the fact that we are unhappy and with the causes, meanings, and consequences of our unhappiness. Research has repeatedly shown that if we have tended to react to our sadness or depressed moods in these ways in the past, then we are likely to find the same strategy volunteering to ‘help’ again and again when our moods start to slide. And it will have the same effect: we’ll get stuck in the very mood from which we are trying to escape. As a consequence, we are at even higher risk of experiencing repeated bouts of unhappiness.”

In the First Person

I need a lot of time to get going in the morning – slurps of java, (the Starbucks “bold blend” varnish remover if I need a “stiff drink”) time to read the morning news, a sliver of time to plan my day — and sometimes, ruminate. When ruminating, it’s as if pieces of my past are painted on those little squares of a Rubik’s cube that I’m endlessly manipulating to solve.

Even though this style of thinking ends up making me feels crummy, in varying degrees, I like to ruminate. It some odd way, it seems to temporarily relieve me of any free-floating anxiety I might be experiencing.

Melissa Kirk writes,

“It feels good to ruminate. Why is this? Two things happen to me when I’m dwelling on a problem. The dwelling seems to stop the immediate pain or distress, the way rubbing a sore muscle can relieve the soreness temporarily, until you stop rubbing. Also, I feel like, when I’m ruminating, that I’m acting on the problem of trying to solve it. Rumination, then gives us the sense of taking action towards a situation that is distressing us, which relieves the distress in the short-term.”

This type of “mind rub” also skews the facts: I ignore the positive side of those past events and accentuate the negative. Indeed it is rumination’s focus on the negative that gives it its solution-less quality.

We usually don’t ruminate when we’re happy. When life is good, we savor everyday plentitudes of grace that have fallen on us whether earned or not. This type of looking back is really reflection, not rumination. When we reflect, we appreciate and learn from our past; no need to chomp on the bitter morsels of yesterday. Interesting aside: the origins of the word “ruminate” come from the Latin word to describe the process in which cows chew and regurgitate their food, or “cud,” over and over again – yummy!

We chew on our thoughts when we’re upset or in some kind of emotional pain or funk. Rumination is a way of responding to life that involves repetitively and passively focusing on the symptoms of distress, and on its possible causes and consequences. This plugs into depression because depression is passive. We feel scant energy and incapable of taking action when in a melancholic ditch.

According to The Mindful Way through Depression,

“We ruminate because we believe it will help us overcome the unhappiness of depression. We believe that not doing it will make our condition worse and worse. We ruminate when we feel low because we believe that it will reveal a way to solve our problems. But research shows that it does exactly the opposite: our ability to solve problems actually deteriorates markedly during rumination. All of the evidence seems to point to the stark truth that rumination is part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

According to research done by Susan Nolen- Hoeksema, Ph.D., many ruminators negative outlook hurts their problem-solving ability. According to her research, they often struggle to find good solutions to hypothetical problems. For example, if a friend is avoiding them, they might say, “Well, I guess I’ll just avoid them too.” Even when a person is prone to rumination comes up with a potential solution to a significant problem the rumination itself may induce a level of uncertainty and immobilization that makes it hard for them to move forward. Such depressive rumination most often occurs in women as a reaction to sadness. Men, by comparison, more often focus on their emotions when they’re angry, rather than sad.

Percolations in the Brain

According to a recent Stanford study by Sian Beilock, Ph.D., changes were discovered in the brains of depression sufferers when ruminating. MRI’s were taken of two separate groups: those with and those without depression. Each group was separately prompted with various techniques to promote ruminative thinking. The MRI’s of people’s heads disclosed that a lot is going on in our brains when we are ruminating.

According to an article in Montior magazine commenting upon Beilock’s work:

“People with major depression had greater activation than controls during the rumination task in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. Thought to be involved in mood regulation, the anterior cingulate cortex may be infusing more emotion into the depressed individual’s ruminations than controls. Depressed individuals also had greater activation in the amygdala, that almond shaped region deep in the brain that is a major player in negative emotional reactions. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, people with depression showed greater activation in the prefrontal cortex, where our working memory (a.k.a. cognitive horsepower) is housed. If depressed individuals spend a lot more of this neural real estate trying to regulate their thinking, they may have less brain power left over to do other important thinking and reasoning tasks. This may explain the cognitive deficits depressed folks sometimes show.”

Unplugging From Rumination

Here are some thoughts about how to deal with rumination.

First, need to learn that rumination doesn’t solve our problems – it insidiously perpetuates them. “We can’t,” wrote Albert Einstein, “solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We can’t solve our depression by using the same ruminative thinking habits that may have caused it to begin with.

Second, we need to see why, if it doesn’t work, we keep doing it. We do so because it tricks us into thinking we are actually being productive and briefly reduces our anxiety.

Third, once we have seen that it doesn’t work and why we keep doing it, we need to make small behavioral steps and resolutions to change it. Yet, as Dr. O’Connor says, “We aren’t to blame for our depression. But, we are responsible for getting better.” Responsibility implies action, not just good intentions.

Depressives often hit a wall in their recovery when asked to change their thinking and/or behavior: they’re either too tired, frozen or can’t get out of their own way. Often, they are fatalistic: “The way I see the world is just the way the world is and my life is – screwed up.” They feel that life has dealt them a bad hand and try to solve unsolvable problems: “What did I do to deserve depression? Why can’t I ever get things done?” These thoughts just produce paralysis, not productive solutions.

Of course, there’s an element of truth to many of our ruminations. If there weren’t so, we wouldn’t endlessly cudgel ourselves over the head because we would quickly see just how silly ruminating really is. For example, would any of us ruminate about why we didn’t become a circus clown? We don’t because there’s not a scintilla of evidence in our past that we ever wanted to be a clown or had the opportunity to do so.

Rumination is more clever and seductive than that. The ruminative habit compels us to churn away at half-truths or things that actually did happen. For example, “why were my parents so screwed up?” Or “why did they leave me a legacy of depression or anxiety?” There’s truth in these questions. My parents were screwed up. My parents did leave me a legacy of depression.

It’s been written that the truth will set us free. The problem here isn’t with the truth, it’s what we do with it. Ruminators run with it in a destructive way when they cycle through these issues over and over again with no resolution in sight. With regard to our parents painful legacy for many of us, is there any answer that would ever satisfy us?

There is tragedy in this world, bad things do happen to good people and life is often unfair. Yet, as Helen Keller once wrote, “The world is full of suffering. But, it’s also full of the overcoming of it.” THAT is reality too. So, when we sit down to eat our daily fare of our thoughts and meanderings that make up our days, we might want to pick from the upbeat side of the menu.

And not chew on our food too much.

Finding Our Way in the Law

It’s in the darkness of men’s eyes that they get lost – Black Elk

Graduating from law school is both exciting and frightening at the same time. There’s a real itch to put our knowledge into action, to be a bona fide “attorney at law” and to start making some dough instead of spending it on tuition and books. On the other hand, we really don’t know a lot about the application of legal theory to legal combat, may have a heap of debt and pray that our first stab at competency doesn’t land us face first on the courthouse steps.

Beyond all of these pragmatic concerns is the meatier matter of living a life in the law that matters; a life in accord with our inner core of what we truly value in life. As author Studs Turkel once wrote:

“Work is about a daily search for meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short for a sort of life, rather than a Monday-to-Friday sort of dying.”

Lawyers, young and old alike, find it difficult to live out their values in the workplace, to search for “meaning as well as daily bread.” There are challenges and compromises, some more difficult than others. For example, we may really value spending time with our family. But as the demands of our career mount, we become untethered from this life-giving sustenance as we spend more and more time toiling at the office.

Andrew Benjamin, Ph.D., J.D., a lead researcher in studies about the mental health of law students and lawyers, concludes that much of the dissatisfaction in the profession comes from a widening gap between the values we truly care about and the things we end up pursuing in in our jobs as lawyers. This takes place over time and its effects are cumulative. Many end up leaving the profession. Or, if they stay, are mired in unhappiness, discontent and can’t see a way out.

Dr. Benjamin found that approximately 20% of lawyers – about twice the national average – aren’t just unhappy; they’re suffering from clinical anxiety or depression. We aren’t talking about everyday stress, sadness, blues or categorical grumpiness. We’re talking rubber to the road clinical anxiety and depression; devastating diseases that cause breakdowns in every area of one’s life. Put in perspective, Benjamin’s studies suggest that a whopping 200,000 of this nation’s 1 million lawyers are struggling – some very badly.

Certainly a gap between our values and the way we live as lawyers doesn’t cause depression. But it’s one of many factors that include a history of depression in one’s family and emotional abuse and/or neglect during one’s formative years that make a person prone to depression.

Lawyers also seem to have a particularly fearsome type of stress overload; a jacked central nervous system fueled by the adversarial nature of the trade. Modern science now knows that there is a powerful connection between chronic and remitting stress and the development of clinical depression. As I wrote in “How Stress and Anxiety Become Depression,” chronic stress and anxiety causes the release of too many fight-or-flight hormones such as cortisol which damages areas of the brain that have been implicated in depression: the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory) and the amygdala (involved in how we perceive fear).

The point of all this sobering news isn’t to rain on anyone’s parade. Law can and should be a noble calling and a satisfying way to make a living. Rather, these warnings are meant to impart some thorny wisdom: living out your values and dreams are just as important as – to quote my brother Wally’s favorite expression, “carving out a living”. Or, as Studs Terkel earlier surmised: “. . . to have a sort of life, rather than a Monday-to-Friday sort of dying.”

It’s scary when you sense that you’ve wasted a lot of time doing a type of law – or law at all – that fails to connect with your deeper values. Part of the fear is driven by the growing sense as we age that we don’t have forever – we are finite beings. When we don’t know the way, can’t find path to move our outer life closer to our inner life, we can experience a sort of existential terror. We may be sitting in a classroom, at court or just wandering downtown during our lunch break and a visceral sense that we yearn for something else will hit us. How many of us quickly dismiss such thoughts as minor meanderings that aren’t worth our time. But, these thoughts may keep coming. Listen to them. If we don’t, we may risk greater peril.

Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, talks about the dangers of not following the murmurs coming from within us all:

“Of course, most people won’t follow a calling until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so – pain that we appear to have an appalling high threshold for. Eventually the prospect of emotional and financial turmoil, the disapproval of others and the various conniptions of change, can begin to seem preferable to the psychological death you are experiencing by staying put. Those who refuse their passions and purposes in life, though, who are afraid of becoming what they perhaps already are – unhappy – won’t of course experience the unrest (or the joy) that usually accompanies the embrace of a calling. Having attempted nothing, they haven’t failed, and they console themselves that if none of their dreams come true then at least neither will their nightmares.”

So remember your values and where they are trying to lead you. That’s realistic. Our values are not set in granite; they can and will change over time. Yet the only tuning fork you will ultimately have is trying to build a solid bridge between who you really are and what you are in the real world. We can and will hit choppy waters as we sail our ships in our careers. There will be many temptations – money, power. This story has been played out for millennia. As you go through your career, watch the currents and stir your ship bravely, with integrity and passion.

As Apple founder Steve Jobs wrote:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s grievances drown out your own inner voice; and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Is It Lawyer Unhappiness or Depression?

Since you get more joy out of giving to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give – Eleanor Roosevelt

There’s a Difference

Is there a difference between discontent and depression, a lack of fulfillment and true melancholia?

The lines between murky malaise and downright clinical depression are blurred in everyday conversation, the popular media and discourse amongst professionals and academics about what troubles the legal profession. Two journal articles – which, by the way, I enjoyed immensely, “Stemming the Tide of Law School Depression: What Law Schools Need to Learn from the Science of Positive Psychology” and “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession” took this approach by canvasing studies that have been done on law student and lawyer unhappiness, discontent, stress, anxiety, depression and wellness.

But unhappiness is not depression, not even close. I am not saying that this was the authors’ intentions, or for that matter, even their suggestion. Nor I am saying that these issues aren’t related to one another. Yet, I don’t think this lumping-of-the-maladies approach is particularly productive because it plays into the popular myths that depression is just an amplification of everyday sadness or, worse, a banal self-absorption with all that’s wrong in one’s life. Remarkably, a recent poll showed that 45% of Americans think of depression as a failure of will.

Another problem with the lumping together approach is that sadness and depression call for radically different solutions. In the two journal articles cited above, the first concentrates on positive psychology and how it can help alleviate distress and the later on living an ethical life and picking the right job — no doubt important considerations for everyone. Yet I’m not sure that any of these approaches is a panacea to the epidemic of depression in the law.

To me, unhappiness and discontent are part of the human predicament. It’s unavoidable that all of us will go through epochs in our lives when things unequivocally stink; we mope and wonder why meteorites always seem to pelt us when our car battery’s dead, our kids are in an uproar and the day at the office was survivable at best. In the book Zorba the Greek, the larger than life Zorba was asked if he was married and replied with great gusto, “Me? Wife, kids, job — the full catastrophe!!”

But depression isn’t part of the human condition. It’s a multifaceted illness, for some disabling and for many cruel. For many of its victims, the pain isn’t so much a feeling of sadness, but of nothingness. There’s no air to breath, little room to escape this type of pain – until one, hopefully, gets treatment or it passes, mercifully, of its own inscrutable violation.

How can nothingness be painful? Perhaps, it’s because it’s emotions that give life its vibrancy. These visceral forces energize us, heighten the intensity of our lives and make the human experience so rich. The absence of this life force leaves us impoverished, longing and mourning for that richness in our being we once knew.

Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, herself a depressive, captured this experience when she wrote:

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t.”

At least when the problem is one of discontent, we have our faculties (e.g. the ability to concentrate), are capable of making choices and bring focused energy to bear on changing matters in small or large ways. For someone in the throes of depression, the power to choose is diminished if not extinguished. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., in his seminal book Undoing Depression, writes in his blog:

“Everyone knows what depression feels like. Everyone feels the blues at times. Sadness, disappointment, fatigue are normal parts of life. There is a connection between the blues and clinical depression, but the difference is like the difference between the sniffles and pneumonia.”

No, depression isn’t unhappiness. But discontent in one’s vocation is a real problem and often very painful. We feel like a jammed door that won’t let us open into a life that works on some fundamental level. We know something is wrong, sense that we’re stuck like in the traffic of our lives. Our happiness is trying to tell us something and we know it. Our emotional core senses we’ve been living a life out of sync with who we really are. And if we’re in the legal profession, we’re not alone in this experience – far, far from it.

Drifting Towards Unhappiness in the Law

There has been much debate about whether lawyers are really unhappy, to what degree, why that is so and what can be done about it. The Wall Street Journal interviewed Gretchen Rubin, a Yale Law School alumnus who clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor, about her book “The Happiness Project.” Here’s her take on why so many lawyers find themselves in funks:

“There’s [this] whole notion of ‘drift’ that I think a lot of people fall into with law school. They’d don’t decide, necessarily, to go to law school, but they drift into it, really for a lack of a better idea. And that’s one of the reasons so many lawyers are unhappy. They hear these lines that, on their face, seem to make sense: ‘It can’t hurt to take the LSAT.’ ‘I can always go to law school.’ ‘I can always change my mind later.’ That’s what happened to me. I drifted into it.”

Gretchen realized that she had never made any real choice about whether to go to law school, let alone join the legal profession. Yet, how many lawyers really chose their jobs? Most of us stumble around. There is a steep learning curve to life and there are few instruction manuals. It’s often through trial and error that most people find their way. The discovery that you’ve invested lots of time and money into a career that you later find was a bad fit is troubling indeed. Many aren’t willing or able to make the leap to change matters; hence, unhappiness and distress.

Perhaps the notion of happiness depends on how long you’ve been in the profession. Recently minted lawyers seem to expect something more from their jobs than their predecessors. The New York Times article The Falling Down Professions notes:

“Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago. ‘There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self,’ notes Richard Florida, the author “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it is Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life.” ‘Now they just want to be themselves. It’s almost as if they are interviewing places to see if they fit them.”

In a sense, it’s amazing that young lawyers are even taking into consideration flexibility and creativity; all the more so given the sour economy and the glut of law school graduates — currently about 150,000 per year. But an increasing number of young lawyers seem willing to seek a job fit that jives with their desire for not only a decent paycheck, but a decent life. Many middle-aged or older lawyers eventually get there, but often after a lot of struggle and pain. Some switch jobs to find a better fit (the litigator who starts a real estate practice) or others chuck the whole profession and start life anew in other fields.

In the new book “The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law,” the authors point out that six experiences that are critical to making a person satisfied with her life, including security, autonomy, authenticity, relatedness, competence, and self-esteem. Certainly, money can and should be part of the equation, but not to the exclusion of other intrinsic values.

There’s nothing new here, but don’t we all need to be reminded of this message over and over again? At the very least, it’s a counterweight to the popular and legal culture which puts way too much emphasis on money and deludes us into thinking that more of it will mean greater happiness.

According to psychology expert and lawyer Dan Bowling, “Common sense, though, would suggest that the happiest lawyers are those who feel they are really good at law practice, who deal with clients and can see results of their work, or who have a sense that they are involved in a greater cause. Another question about the research, he say, ‘and I think it’s a fair question is this one. ‘It’s the so-what question. It is: Whoever said law is supposed to be easy? Law is a career sacrifice for clients. . . . Who said we’re supposed to be happy?’ Bowling has an answer: ‘I think the law can be a jealous mistress, but I also think she can be kind, too,” he says.

A contrary view is offered in “Scholars Debate: Is Law a Picnic?” by Harvard Law Professor David B. Wilkins who reports that in a study of 4000 lawyers in the first decade of their careers: “. . . contrary to what many believe, there is ‘no evidence’ of ‘any pervasive unhappiness in the profession,’ he says – at least not among those who began practicing in 2000. In that group, nearly three-quarters reported being ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with their jobs.

Perhaps happiness is somewhat determined by the type of law we go into. In The Happy Lawyer, the authors note that those who work for government, in a small firm, or in a solo practice, as well as those attorneys who work aligns with their values, are more likely to be satisfied with their careers.

In “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession,” Patrick Schlitz writes:

“This is the best advice I can give you: Right now, while you are still in law school, make the commitment—not just in your head, but in your heart—that, although you are willing to work hard and you would like to make a comfortable living, you are not going to let money dominate your life to the exclusion of all else. And don’t just structure your life around this negative; embrace a positive. Believe in something—care about something—so that when the culture of greed presses in on you from all sides, there will be something inside of you pushing back. Make the decision now that you will be the one who defines success for you—not your classmates, not big law firms, not clients of big law firms, not the National Law Journal. You will be a happier, healthier, and more ethical attorney as a result.”

We each have to take our own journey in life to find out what makes us happy. Just don’t get stuck in negative rumination about what’s wrong in your life. Think about what could be “right” in your life. Believe, at the very least, in the possibilities and follow your passion. Make no mistake about it, there will be a cost. If one follows one’s passion there may be risk, the displeasure of our peers and family members and financial concerns. But if one doesn’t take this journey, if money carries too much weight in what we’re willing to do to make a living, we will be unhappy; if this situation goes on to long, maybe depressed.

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