About one-fifth of lawyers and staffers considered suicide at some point in their careers, new survey says.

Debra Cassens Weiss

American Bar Association Journal

Originally posted 10 MAY 22

A new survey of lawyers and staff members hailing mostly from BigLaw has found that anxiety, depression and isolation remain at concerning levels, despite a slight decrease in the percentages since the survey last year.

The Mental Health Survey by Law.com and ALM Intelligence found that 67% of the respondents reported anxiety, 35% reported depression and 44% reported isolation, according to an article by Law.com.

The survey, conducted in March and April, asked respondents from around the world about their mental health and law firm environments in 2021.

The percentage of respondents who contemplated suicide at some point in their professional careers was 19%, the article reports.

In addition, 2.4% of the respondents said they had a drug problem, and 9.4% said they had an issue with alcoholic drinking.

About 74% of the respondents thought that their work environment contributed to their mental health issues. When asked about the factors that had a negative impact on mental health, top concerns were always being on call (72%), billable hour pressure (59%), client demands (57%), lack of sleep (55%) and lean staffing (49.5%).

The survey asked about the impact of remote work for the first time. About 59% said remote work increased their quality of life; about 62% said it increased the quality of home-based relationships; about 54% said it led to an increase in their billable hours; and 50% said it improved personal finances. But 76% said remote work hurt the quality of interpersonal relationships with colleagues.

The info is here.

A well being toolkit for lawyer and legal employers is here.

A third of Americans report anxiety or depression symptoms during the pandemic

Brian Resnick
vox.com
Originally posted 29 May 20

Here is an excerpt:

The pandemic is not over. The virus still has a great potential to infect millions more. It’s unclear what’s going to happen next, especially as different communities enact different precautions and as federal officials and ordinary citizens grow fatigued with pandemic life.

The uncertainty of this era is likely contributing to the mental health strain on the nation. As the pandemic wears on into the summer, some people may grow resilient to the grim reality they face, while others may see their mental health deteriorate more.

What’s also concerning is that, even pre-pandemic, there were already huge gaps in mental health care in America. Clinicians have been in short supply, many do not take insurance, and it can be hard to tell the difference between a clinician who uses evidence-based treatments and one who does not.

If you’re reading this and need help, know there are free online mental health resources that can be a good place to start. (Clinical psychologist Kathryn Gordon lists 11 of them on her website.)

The Covid-19 pandemic has a knack for exacerbating underlying problems in the United States. The disease is hitting the poor and communities of color harder than white communities. And that’s also reflected here in the data on mental health strain.

As the pandemic continues, it will be important to recognize the growing mental health impacts for such a large portion of Americans — and to uncover who is being disproportionately impacted. Hospitalizations and infection rates are critical to note. But the mental health fallout — from not just the virus but from all of its ramifications — will be essential to keep tracking, too.

The info is here.

Suicides of two health care workers hint at the Covid-19 mental health crisis to come

Wendy Dean
statnews.com
Originally posted 30 April 2020

Here is an excerpt:

Denial, minimizing, and compartmentalizing are essential strategies for coping with a crisis. They are the psychological tools we reach for over and over to get through harrowing situations. Health care workers learn this through experience and by watching others. We learn how not to pass out in the trauma bay. We learn to flip into “rational mode” when a patient is hemorrhaging or in cardiac arrest, attending to the details of survival — their vital signs, lab results, imaging studies. We learn that if we grieve for the 17-year-old gunshot victim while we are doing chest compressions we will buckle and he will die. So we shut down feeling and just keep doing.

What few health care workers learn how to do is manage the abstractness of emotional recovery, when there is nothing to act on, no numbers to attend, no easily measurable markers of improvement. It is also hard to learn to resolve emotional experiences by watching others, because this kind of intense processing is a private undertaking. We rarely get to watch how someone else swims in the surf of traumatic experience.

Those on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially those in the hardest-hit areas, have seen conditions they never imagined possible in the country with the most expensive health care system in the world. Watching patients die alone is traumatic. Having to choose your own safety over offering comfort to the dying because your hospital or health care system doesn’t have enough personal protective equipment to go around inflicts moral injury. When facing the reality of constrained resources and unthinkable choices, working to exhaustion, and caring for patients at great personal risk, the only way to get through each shift is to do what is immediately at hand.

The info is here.

Top 10 lies doctors tell themselves

Pamela Wible
www.idealmedicalcare.org
Originally published December 27, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Sydney Ashland: “I must overwork and overextend myself.” I hear this all the time. Workaholism, alcoholism, self-medicating. These are the top coping strategies that we, as medical professionals, use to deal with unrealistic work demands. We tell ourselves, “In order to get everything done that I have to get done. In order to meet expectations, meet the deadlines, then I have to overwork.” And this is not true. If you believe in it, you are participating in the lie, you’re enabling it. Start to claim yourself. Start to claim your time. Don’t participate. Don’t believe that there is a magic workaround or gimmick that’s going to enable you to stay in a toxic work environment and reshuffle the deck. What happens is in that shuffling process you continue to overcompensate, overdo, overextend yourself—and you’ve moved from overwork on the face of things to complicating your life. This is common. Liberate yourself. You can be free. It’s not about overwork.

Pamela Wible: And here’s the thing that really is almost humorous. What physicians do when they’re overworked, their solution for overwork—is to overwork. Right? They’re like, “Okay. I’m exhausted. I’m tired. My office isn’t working. I’ll get another phone line. I’ll get two more receptionists. I’ll add three more patients per day.” Your solution to overwork, if it’s overwork, is probably not going to work.

The interview is here.

The Kindness Cure

By David Desteno
The Atlantic
Originally published July 21, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Since acting compassionately usually means putting others’ needs ahead of your own, prompting yourself to act with kindness often requires not only vigilance but a bit of willpower. That’s not to say that relying on religious or philosophical guidance to prompt kindness won’t work at times. It will. But any method that depends on constant redirection of selfish urges and top-down monitoring of one’s moral code is apt to fail. Perhaps cultivating compassion situationally—so that it automatically emerges at the sight of others in need—would be more foolproof. As a psychologist interested in moral behavior, I have long wondered if there might be a way to develop precisely this sort of reflexive compassion.

As it turns out, I didn’t have to look too far; a means was hiding in plain sight. Mindfulness meditation involves guided contemplation as a way to focus the mind. It commonly entails sitting in a quiet space for periods ranging from 20 minutes to an hour (depending on your level of advancement) and learning to guide awareness to the current moment rather than dwell upon what has been or is yet to come.

The entire article is here.