University of San Francisco Law Professor Rhonda Magee writes in the ABA Journal, “Few would disagree that if the purported benefits of mindfulness prove to be true, no profession is in greater need of them than ours. And indeed, the legal profession is responding. Law schools, lawyers and judges are reviewing the research detailing benefits: reduced stress, lower blood pressure, increased empathy, improved performance on exams and during arguments, more ethical decision-making, and more satisfying and effective client counseling conversations. And they are practicing mindfulness to assist in handling the stress of legal practice and to improve performance.” Read her Blog
Life Experience and Cognitive Science Deepen the Case for Mindfulness in Law
More Than 25% of Law Students Have Had Psychiatric and Substance-use Disorders; Are They Hiding It?
The ABA Journal reports, “More than a quarter of surveyed law students said they had been diagnosed at some point for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, psychosis, personality disorder or substance use disorder, Bloomberg News reports. Results of the survey, taken from February to May 2014, are summarized in this Bar Examiners article.” Read the News
Introverts in an Extroverts’ World: Most Lawyers Are Introvert, and That’s Not a Bad Thing
The current issue of the ABA Journal reports, “It’s not something you’d intuitively think, particularly when you think of litigators,” Wisnik says. “But it makes sense. Many lawyers spend a lot of time by themselves—reading, writing, thinking—compared to other jobs where the majority of the work is interacting. Introverts make good lawyers, especially for clients who want a thoughtful answer.” Read the Story
Why Do Lawyers and Law Students Get So Depressed?
In this article from The Washington Monthly, David Ball explores the connection between law school depression and the troubling questions about mental health in the Character & Fitness requirement in some state bars. Read the News
Undoing Depression in Lawyers
There’s some interesting research to suggest that happy people view the world through certain comforting illusions, while depressed people see things more realistically. [i] For instance, the illusion of control. You can take a random sample of people and sit them in front of a video monitor with a joy stick, and tell them their joy stick is controlling the action of the game on the screen. (But the point of experiment is that it actually doesn’t). Depressed people will soon turn to the lab assistant and complain that their joy stick isn’t hooked up correctly. Normal people, on the other hand, will go on happily playing the game for quite some time.
I think this explains a lot about why lawyers are so prone to depression. Because of their experience with the law, most attorneys have lost their rose-colored glasses some time ago. (Or else they never had them and chose the law as a career because it suited their personality). Attorneys know that life is hard, and doesn’t play fair. They’re trained to look for every conceivable thing that could go wrong in any scenario, and they rarely are able to leave that attitude at the office. They see the worst in people (sometimes they see the best, but that’s rare). They tend to be strivers and individualists, not wanting to rely on others for support. They have high expectations of success, but they often find that when they’ve attained success, they have no one to play with, and have forgotten how to enjoy themselves anyway.
All this makes it hard for attorneys to get help with their depression. They tend not to recognize it as such; they just think it’s stress, or burn out, or life. They don’t expect that anyone is going to be able to help. Most of my attorney-patients have contacted me because their relationships are falling apart, but they don’t see that it’s depression that makes them such a lousy partner – tense, irritable, critical, joyless, tired all of the time, relying on alcohol or other drugs. If they’d gotten help for the depression a couple of years previously, their spouse wouldn’t be moving out now. The truth about depression is that it not only makes you feel horrible, it wrecks your life. And that’s why I wrote the book, Undoing Depression, in the first place. I was running an outpatient clinic, and grew exasperated with seeing the people whose lives wouldn’t have been so ruined if they had got some help when they first needed it – before they alienated their children and spouse, got fired, went into debt, developed a substance abuse problem, etc. I thought there was a need for an intelligent self-help book, one that points out all the bad habits that depression engenders and which, in a vicious circle, keeps reenforcing the disease. But the truth is that self-help isn’t nearly enough for most depression sufferers. It’s as if you stepped over an invisible cliff, and you can’t find your way back doing what you normally do, because that’s what led you over the cliff in the first place. Depression is the original mind/body disease; your physical brain is damaged because of the stress in your mind, and you’re unlikely to undo that damage without help.
Depression is highly treatable, but if you want a lasting recovery you have to change your life. The ugly fact is that depression is very likely to reoccur. If you had one episode of major depression, chances are 50:50 that you’ll have another; if you have three episodes, it’s 10:1 you’ll have more. But you can improve those odds if you get good professional help, with medication and with talk therapy. We won’t put your rose-colored glasses back on, but we can help you see how negative thinking and the negative acting is contributing to your disease.
[i] See for example, Shelly Taylor: Positive Illusions; and Julie Noren: The Positive Power of Negative Thinking.
Lawyers, Don’t Let Perfectionism Ruin Your Health
Duke University Law grad, Jennifer Alvey explores why lawyers have such poor mental and physical health: “Part of the answer lies in lawyers’ predisposition toward perfectionism. I often encounter lawyers who can only envision doing something if they can be all in. Doing something less-than-perfectly is seen as failure. When it comes to exercise and diet, this kind of thinking can set anyone up for failure because they will try to make big, grand changes at once, be unable to sustain them, and quickly quit in disgust.” Read the rest of her Blog
Take the Screen! Lawyers Suffer From Depression About 3.6 Times More Than Non-lawyers
Katherine Bender, Ph.D., writes: “What are the barriers to getting a screening for depression? Why do we see over and over again law students and attorneys trying to ‘white-knuckle’ through another day?” Kate encourages law student and lawyers to take this on-line depression screening test. Read her Blog
Why Do Lawyers Fall Victim to Depression
Despite being in a remunerative and prestigious profession, lawyers often fall victim of depression. According to a 2014 pool, “52 percent of practicing lawyers describe themselves as dissatisfied. Read the Blog
Preventing Depression Among Lawyers
Kevin O’Keefe, CEO and founder of LexBlog, writes, “Having personally experienced the lows of depression and the positive energy that comes from blogging and social media, I have to believe the effective use of social media could prevent depression for many lawyers.” Read his Blog
One Woman Lawyer’s Journey Through Depression
Acknowledging my depression for the first time during my third year of law school was as terrifying a realization as it was liberating. Between finishing up final classes, getting ready for the bar exam, and preparing for the first semester of my LL.M degree program, I fought every day to simply get out of my own way, and I fought even harder to hide it. I would wake up in the morning in tears, yet by the afternoon I was at school, going through the motions, and relieved to just make it to the end of the day.
This contradiction of being in law school and living with depression was an unbearable secret. At my core, I was beyond ashamed and embarrassed. I would beat myself up over and over again with the same though: how did I mange get myself to law school only to end up feeling this way? I was so lost, and I was experiencing a pain that was as indescribable and unfamiliar as it was pervasive and present. I convinced myself this that feeling this way was the price I had to pay to become a lawyer, to live up to this expectation I had created about myself. So just get through it, I told myself. This is the way it’s to be done. Suck it up. Survive.
In the months to come, however, my depression worsened. Despite having passed the bar exam, started course work toward my LL.M degree, and a relationship with a man who said he cared for me, I crashed. I spent entire days in bed, with no one to the wiser. I stopped answering my phone and emails, and I wasn’t going to classes. Getting out of bed felt like stepping off the edge of a cliff. Life having any sense of forward momentum and progress was something that seemed to happening for other people, and I was left struggling, trying to figure out how to keep up.
Something inside me managed to articulate clearly and loudly that something was wrong with me that went beyond telling myself to suck it up. One morning, moved by forces that to this day are still a mystery to me, I found my way to the university’s student counseling services. A social worker took me in a back room for an intake interview. Directly and clearly, I was honest for the first time about what was happening to me. The next thing I knew I had a calendar filled with multiple weekly appointments with a psychiatrist who immediately put me on an anti-depressant and talk therapy.
Believe me when I say that those talk therapy sessions in the student counseling center changed my life. My therapist saw through me with kindness and compassion in a way I didn’t think was possible for another person to do, and she understood the how and why of what was happening to me. She helped me put words to emotions and thoughts that existed only in my head. I learned that I could say I was dealing with depression, and that with work it was something I could learn to manage.
But my therapist also told me this was only the beginning for me with understanding and successfully managing my depression. She said we had only scratched the surface. Her words were profound and prescient. As my experience with law evolved from getting through the competitive and pressure filled environment of law school to the demands of practice, so did my experience with depression and its affect on my ability to know and to listen to love myself. For a while, I felt good, and depression felt like memory. I found I was more comfortable with and better at being a working lawyer than I was a law student. Practice requires you to touch more upon your true nature more, I think, than law school. There was less posturing and more action, and I am more suited for that reality. I still, however, had a lot to learn about asserting myself and holding my own in intense environments. As the red flags of my depressive behaviors and thoughts would pop up, I realized that no matter what anti-depressant I was on, or what words of wisdom I tried desperately to recall from a therapy session, I was still out of sync with myself emotionally and my surroundings. This was a powerful insight, but I still could not in the moment handle the stresses I experienced on a daily basis successfully or in a way that felt true to myself. Sexism, cutthroat competitive colleagues, long hours, bitter partners who saw heaping insult upon you as affective training and as lawyerly karmic right. The romantic ideal of the practice of law as noble and worthwhile was elusive and false. The reality was all too much.
Even as I become more successful in advancing my career, obtaining a Federal clerkship and a Big Law job, my depression didn’t dissipate and disappear, as I had naively hoped it would (because as all lawyers know, the right job and status fix things, right?). Instead, its presence became more insidious, because when I felt it, I immediately knew it meant that something was dreadfully wrong, and the fear of where it could take me became all-consuming. The energy it took for me to hold my own with colleagues and clients and still at the end of the day deliver good work took over, and any healthy sense of self-care I had learned when I first acknowledged depression in my life was pushed aside. I now felt like a failure at the most fundamental level because I couldn’t control my depression. Even as my experiences with depressive tendencies became more insightful and clearer to me in their meaning, I was still at a loss as to what to do, and I brutally beat myself up for not being able to fix it.
After completion of a project I was on in 2009, I left my job, and I left life as a working lawyer. And again, I crashed. For a time, I swung too far in the other direction, internalizing depression to the point where it became my identity. I didn’t know where depression ended and my sense of self began, and concluded that the entirety of my life would be determined by its presence. Therapy and medication again were options, but this time, I knew in my gut what I needed was beyond the relief they would provide.
Only with time and by stepping back from thinking of myself as both a lawyer and as someone with depression have I have learned that ultimately I am neither one of those things. I have learned that when I fight and ignore my intuition is when I get into trouble. That is what depression at its worst takes from me. It takes away my voice. When outside noise and pressure and people are too loud, and are in turn amplified in my mind by my depressive thinking, I, in the most glorious sense of the word, am gone. The “I” whose evidence of worth is proved by mere existence; the “I” that only has to live and breathe to be worthy, is nothing to me. All I can see is worry and striving and other people’s judgments, and my own judgments, and angst and pain.
I don’t know that I will work in law again, but I entertain the thought now and then. This thought isn’t without a realistic notion of what it will take to get back into the profession, so, equally, I honor the thought that I may never find a fit for myself in law. I’ve also accepted depression in my life as a siren meant to warn me I’m headed for trouble. This clarity isn’t without fear. I’ve had hard times since I left my last job as a lawyer, but I can honestly say that what I’ve learned about myself and life since has so far been worth it all.
By Anonymous
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