The mental health of lawyers

The mental health of lawyers

This is another of my occasional collections of posts on one theme. This time it’s five posts about the mental health challenges faced by lawyers.

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The law is built on responsibility. One party must do one thing, and the other party another, and they are liable if they do not do so. This is a dichotomous, yes/no view. The law recognises the alternative possibility of a greater force intervening but that’s not something it pays much credence to.

We live a life of blame therefore and, being aspirational and self-motivating, we tend to blame ourselves when things go wrong. To ‘blame’ comes from the Greek, ‘blaspheme’, which literally means to do injury by speaking. When we blame, we injure ourselves.

It’s important we take responsibility for our actions. Blaming others for everything is delusional, and we learn by recognising where we have gone wrong. But equally we should not injure ourselves where others are responsible. People do bad things to us (usually out of selfishness, ignorance or fear). And bad things happen from the turn of events, where no person is responsible.

We need to stand back, and pause, and think, and decide if we are properly taking responsibility or if we are causing ourselves unnecessary pain.

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Researchers classify different electrical activity in the brain as five ‘waves’, measurable by an electroencephalogram and corresponding to the most intense activity (gamma waves) through to the deepest sleep (delta waves). They’re like different gears on a car engine and, just as you wouldn’t drive a car on one gear all the time, so you need to adjust the state of your brain throughout your day.

The law requires intense mental activity. Not only is the client work complicated, but we sit in front of screens showing emails, pop-ups, pings and the like which constantly demand our attention, and we worry constantly about justifying every minute as productive chargeable time. We’re running our brains at the highest level without giving ourselves a break.

A balance is needed. We need to be able to work intensely in order to do our jobs. But we cannot sustain that intensity without switching off, doing something different, and taking a rest. We should shift through our mental gears over the course of each day: not only the highest and lowest activity at work and in sleep, but also the middle ranges (the alpha waves) when we go for a walk, daydream, and enjoy the company of others.

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A common question asked by art through the ages is what it means to be human (for example, stories contrasting a human with a machine). The answer, most often, is that humanity comes from associating with others, whether with individuals or as part of a community. Indeed, modern science has validated Aristotle’s view that humans are social animals, by measuring the chemical responses in the brain to connections and rejections.

The practice of law carries a fundamental disjunction. We work socially: for clients to solve their problems, and with others in law firms and chambers. But then our efforts are measured in isolation, and translated into currencies that correlate to the time we have recorded not to the human connections we have made.

There’s a cognitive dissonance at play here. To resolve it we need to balance the humanity of law with the inhumanity of legal practice. We need to end each day focussing not on chargeable hours but on relations with others. We need to feel that what we are doing makes us more, not less, human.

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Perhaps the greatest fear of the modern age has been about the removal of autonomy. In the late twentieth century we feared communists and big businesses controlling our lives; in the twenty-first it’s data and those who manipulate it. We need to feel we are in control of ourselves, not just automatons at someone else’s bidding.

The law is a profession where individuals interact with each other and, to make sense of those relationships, we create and operate within hierarchies. It’s also a profession based on the wisdom of years, meaning there are seniors and juniors even in organisations that make a virtue of their flat structures.

With hierarchies and seniority comes power. And autonomy struggles with power. That struggle is all the more difficult for lawyers, who are high-functioning and independent by nature. We need to work inside the system but also be comfortable in ourselves. We need to carve out our own niches where we feel we are valued and feel we can steer our own destinies.

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The revolution in mental health therapy in the early twentieth century included, in particular, efforts to come to terms with one’s past. There was a recognition that what had happened in years gone by had a direct effect on our thoughts and feelings today.

The law is a constant study of the past. We derive meaning from layers upon layers of cases, built up over time. We look back at events to work out liabilities. We save and store up precedents. And yet this backward-looking, paradoxically, discourages us from confronting our own histories. To do so might change our relationship with our present and our future; and, to do our jobs, we prefer the status quo.

We need to move beyond this. We need to be ready to disrupt our relationship with our past. Disruption, however, need not mean destruction. It might lead us, in fact, to a point where we can celebrate our past and joyfully move beyond it. The result should be that we can then seize the present and be hopeful of the future.

Pictures by Marcel Strauss, Jackson Simmer, Pavel Nezmanov, Andres Herrera, Sivani B and Ivan Torres on Unsplash.

Stephen Hanaphy

Barrister at Law at Bar Council of Ireland

2 年

Thanks for taking the time to post this erudite and thought-provoking piece, Ben. Having recently listened to a report on the growth of “foundational AI” across various industries I have to say your piece is a particularly timely reminder to practitioners to strive for balance and to attend to the “human” aspect of cases, insofar as possible.

Isibor O.

Commissioner, IBA Professional Wellbeing Commission| Vice Chair @ American Bar Association | Refugee Law, Human Rights|Climate Reality Leader|Raisina Fellow| UNIDRIOT Ambassador| AFGG Alumni| Ch. Mediator & Conciliators

2 年

Fantastic post. Well done ?? Ben. , It’s nice to know you are a mental health advocate. We need more awareness on this. Thank you for the work you do. “The law requires intense mental activity. Not only is the client work complicated, but we sit in front of screens showing emails, pop-ups, pings and the like which constantly demand our attention, and we worry constantly about justifying every minute as productive chargeable time. We’re running our brains at the highest level without giving ourselves a break”.

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