Mental health and wellbeing counselling for lawyers

I started out in community legal centres, moved to criminal law, both defending and prosecuting,  then onto general practice and finally to family law specialisation.

I was admitted to practice in 1982, and over the time since, I have experienced my share of professional challenges, from gender discrimination (I was sacked from my second job for being married, overlooked for partnership in another for the reason that I was a 30 year old female yet to have children) to many of the other stresses of being a lawyer, such as feeling out of my depth without mentorship, vicarious trauma, billing pressure, ‘difficult’ clients, failing to have work/life boundaries, over-work and finally burn-out. I have seen colleagues suffer the same and worse.

I have read the literature and participated in national and international discussions about mental health and career challenges for lawyers. These conversations have been with lawyers and psychologists and counsellors. I’ve heard the lip service paid to wellbeing, and have a profound belief that the legal system and traditional firm hierarchies need to change, but until they do, lawyers must be cared for.

What I have learned is that we lawyers can be very reluctant to seek out help, even though we may recognise that need in others. We resist taking advantage of EAPs, we are highly sensitive to privacy, we are generally terrified of the impact on our career of being emotionally unwell, we are likely to blame ourselves for not coping rather than blaming external and structural causes, we endlessly compare ourselves to others’ who appear to be coping, we have little education in recognising our own triggers or the place of our own family of origin stories. Lots of us have vivid escape fantasies of leaving law; sometimes that’s the answer, more often, it is not.