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Progress, paradox and ongoing pain
A lingering and contentious issue for the legal profession in 2011 has been that of the mental ill-health of lawyers.There was no shortage of stories about depression and mental health…
A lingering and contentious issue for the legal profession in 2011 has been that of the mental ill-health of lawyers.
There was no shortage of stories about depression and mental health throughout the year, and stories relating to mental illness and depression continued to be some of our most read stories online.
On 2 May, we reported on new research by Beaton Research & Consulting and beyondblue: the national depression initiative on awareness levels and attitudes regarding depression and anxiety disorders among 18,000 professionals in Australia.
The story, Firms still lack action on depression, concluded that while lawyers’ attitudes towards depression in the workplace have improved, law firms are still falling short when it comes to taking action.
The good news, though, was that attitudes and awareness have most definitely changed. “There has been a dramatic improvement in the knowledge, education and understanding among those in the legal profession of things to do with depressive illnesses,” the chairman of beyondblue, Jeffrey Kennett AC, told Lawyers Weekly. “You now have a situation where 22 per cent of lawyers have been subjected to some form of mental health, depression or anxiety training.
That is a huge improvement on where we were 10 years ago, when I suggest there was none, and a big improvement on where we were in 2007.”
In July, we delved into the issue of mental illness in the wake of the news that Magistrates Brian Maloney and Jennifer Betts had to plead with NSW Parliament not to be removed from office after being diagnosed with mental illness, and comments made in the Sun Herald by New South Wales Attorney-General Greg Smith that, “If your mental condition has a tendency to interfere with the way you carry out your job then maybe you shouldn’t be on the bench”.
Our article, The injustice of intolerance, concluded that despite the many gains made, lawyers still find it difficult to talk about mental illness in the workplace.
“An environment which makes [it] harder [to talk about mental illness] needs a serious looking at and changing,” Freehills partner Peter Butler told Lawyers Weekly. “It really worries me that people out there sit there in silnce, terrified of the consequences of letting others know what they’re going through, because they make it so much worse for themselves and, potentially … so much worse for others as well.” This article enraged the managing partner of Marque Lawyers, Michael Bradley, who responded with a hugely popular opinion piece titled Speak the truth, which was published one week later.
| “The debate about mental illness in the legal profession is driving me nuts” Michael Bradley, managing partner, Marque Lawyers
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“The debate about mental illness in the legal profession is driving me nuts,” wrote Bradley. “We appear now to be stuck in a bizarre and immoveable stand-off where the one thing we’re not saying is the one thing we need to address… Fact: lawyers suffer from anxiety and depression, and commit suicide, at a considerably higher rate than thegeneral population. What’s missing is a real discussion of why.”
The essence of Bradley’s argument was that it is time for the legal profession to start being honest about the causes for depression within the profession. “To have anyhope of achieving progress with this problem, we have to name the cause. And it’s very obvious. Our profession just doesn’t want to say it,” he wrote. “The cause is the institutional, corporatised, mercenary and singularly money-driven culture which has been created over the past few decades and permeates every aspect of how most law firms run.”
In November this year, we looked at the issue of lawyers disatisfaction following the advent of a new grassroots movement, OutLawyers, aimed at, among other things, making lawyers happy.
Repairing the paradox brought together an interesting mix of people to discuss just why it is that the profession needs such a group, and what the lingering afflictions are when it comes to mental illness and dissatisfaction.
“I saw a lot of lawyers struggling,” said legal ethicist and OutLawyers founder Neil Watt. “They were battling the negative public perceptions and feeling really bad about the law and their profession. “OutLawyers is not a grumpy group of lawyers here to whine about the profession. It’s a group of positive people who believe in the profession, and who also believe we can do it better, we can do it di_x001E_ erently, we can do it less adversarially. We can build a community in order to provide support.”
