In a speech at Charles Richard Xuereb Oration hosted by the NSW Law Society, emeritus professor and former Western Australia premier Geoffrey Gallop AC said that before the mental health argument shifted from social criticism to one of occupational health and safety, it was already prevalent that a significant percentage of lawyers were not just distressed and overworked but also anxious and depressed.

Mr Gallop said that research continues to point towards lawyers faring worse than other professionals in relation to depression and non-prescription drug use. Law students too were found to be suffering from high levels of depression.

Although the leadership of the profession has jumped to action and some progress has been made in relation to tackling the stigma associated with mental illness, Mr Gallop said mental health still persists as a negative influence, particularly when it operates in the mind of those who suffer and who are reluctant to seek help.

Mr Gallop stated that for the legal profession and mental health researchers, there needs to be a constructive discussion about all of these initiatives and what works or doesn’t.

“That gathering of evidence is most important and to be effective should involve not just researchers but researchers in partnership with lawyers and their various associations which educate and support,” he said.

“In all of this it has been the opening up of a serious re-think within the profession that has created the space for researchers to play a role. Just as the individual sufferer joins the road to better health when they seek help so too the profession itself. Long did lawyers see themselves as invulnerable and ‘above all of that happy talk’.”

Mr Gallop said that all of the recent research has pointed to the fact that the “forces at work in a lawyer’s working environment are complex and powerful just as the forces within an individual, lawyer or otherwise, are complex and powerful and not always understood or recognised.”

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“It follows that individual law students and practitioners are subject to challenges that are very important to their health and wellbeing but not always easy to manage, let alone conquer,” he said.

“It’s a world set for worry not just because of a fear of failure but for a fear of disclosure. There is, for example, the issue of admission to practice and the role mental illness should or shouldn’t play, noting of course the wide range of such illnesses and what they may mean for the individual.

“There’s no easy answer or perfect answer to the dilemma thrown up by these competing considerations. Careful and balanced adjudication will be needed but necessarily conducted in the light of our anti-discrimination commitments, both here and internationally.

“There’s evidence that collective efforts to reform workplaces can be effective and not inefficient, even for the commercially oriented organisations that are part of our mixed economy.”

Mr Gallop did emphasise progress that has been made in awareness raising, evidence gathering, and initiative taking by the medical and legal professions working in partnership.

“On the positive side the researchers were also able to establish that the legal community was responding to these disturbing findings,” he said.

“These included mental health training and access to services being arranged following the work of various committees and working groups across Australia.”

But Mr Gallop said that, despite all of the above, the stigma and the barriers it creates are still issues for the profession.

“It ensures law students and lawyers are in a ‘yes... but’, ‘half-in and half-out world’; the encouragement for the individual to dig deeper and for the organisation to respond more comprehensively is there but not embraced with the consistency and vigour needed to achieve sustainable progress,” he said.

“It’s so important, as Medlow, Kelk and Hickie have reminded us, that programs to support lawyers ‘be conducted regularly over the course of a lawyer’s professional life, rather than on one-off occasions or over short periods’.

“I wish too, that we could say that the inner self is no longer a hidden space, not to be entered for fear of what it might ask of us, but I’m not so sure. Just how serious are we when it comes to re-prioritising our working lives, individually and collectively.”