In the past few weeks there have been multiple articles sounding the alarm surrounding the mental health of lawyers. If you’ve been practicing law longer than ten minutes, none of these articles will surprise you. At the outset, it’s not hard to understand how the law can contribute to or worsen mental health issues. After all, the legal profession is demanding. Conversely, for better or worse, our profession seems to attract those whose behavior might not be tolerated in other environments—and having those people in the workplace, or on the other side of the v—can affect our mental health.

More broadly, one of the many reasons mental health problems exist is our society’s continued failure to meaningfully address them. We came out of the pandemic with a broadened understanding of our need to attend to mental health, but then promptly got back to the same workplaces that created the issues in the first place. Even though so many people around us are suffering, we fail to meet that suffering with compassion. We don’t talk about Bruno!

Of course, as with everything else in law—and in life—women are affected more deeply by this issue. We suffer higher levels of stress, anxiety, and burnout. And, because our concerns are often dismissed, we find it harder to get our workplaces to make substantial changes.

In this issue of Comes Now, we dive into why this may be the case.

The Numbers

Law.com recently completed its fifth annual Mental Health Survey, which surveyed over 2,000 law firm attorneys and 400 legal staff in 2023 regarding the status of their mental health and the factors contributing to it.

The numbers were sobering but not surprising. Nearly 40% of respondents reported feeling depressed. That number grew from 2022 to 2023.

Similarly, nearly 45% of respondents said they felt isolated at work—a number that also increased slightly from 2022.

You can find the complete set of infographics summarizing the results here.

The results for younger lawyers were particularly bleak: lawyers aged 34 and under reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues, as well as more persistent feelings of self-doubt, hopelessness, lost motivation and work-related dread. Their feelings seem understandable given some of the responses senior partners had to the survey: one male equity partner was quoted as saying: “There is way more focus on mental health today than in the past. Associates and staff are coddled. Give me a break.” Other partners responded with generational tropes that the younger generations all want trophies and can’t take constructive criticism.

And, although the Mental Health Survey did not break down its results in this way, we know from other sources that these problems are greater for women than they are for men. In fact, Deloitte’s Women @ Work: A Global Outlook, a survey of 5,000 women in workplaces across 10 countries, recently found that half the women surveyed said their stress levels had increased since last year and that, despite some progress, they are still not receiving adequate mental health support in the workplace. Mental health is a top three concern for women globally (48%), falling behind only their financial security (51%) and rights (50%). Women lawyers are no different. According to the ABA’s 2022 Profile of the Legal Profession, women lawyers were more likely to have stress, anxiety, and depression than men, and more women than men (25% to 17%) considered leaving the profession due to mental health concerns, burnout, or stress.

Why do women in the workplace struggle with their mental health? Where should we start? They don’t feel welcome in male-dominated environments. They are dismissed, harassed, and ignored and, when they talk about these things, they are treated like they’re crazy or given the silent treatment. They are paid less for the same work and are more often overlooked for promotions and appointments. They are juggling too much. They are taking on the majority of household tasks at home and trying to balance caregiving with working. They feel unsafe and unwelcome in the workplace. They are being asked to return to the office without flexible work policies in place.

Et cetera, et cetera.

The Fixes

Most of the analysis [paywall] of the Mental Health Survey focused on the effect of the billable hour and, as you can see below, nearly 45% of respondents agreed that it was a major effect on their stress levels.

But while I don’t question that the billable hour unnecessarily contributes to attorney stress, focusing on the defects of the billable hour system can take the attention away from other factors contributing to the problem. Notably, over three-quarters of respondents—far more than those who said their stress was caused by the billable hour system—said that their work environments had contributed to their mental health issues.

When we’re talking about women lawyers in particular, it’s not billable hours per se that make women stressed and anxious: it’s high billable hours when they also have all the caretaking responsibilities and find their employers to be inflexible. It’s high billable hours with no tools to incorporate other aspects of their lives. As Lisa Kirby, president of inclusive talent systems at Diversity Lab, was recently quoted in Law360 [paywall] as saying: “Often people in BigLaw say the reason women don’t stay is because they have kids and their priorities change, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s more about the environment and whether they see it as a place where they’ll be supported and have an opportunity to advance and not to have to swim against the stream.”

Thus, even though an increasingly greater number of firms are offering mental health resources, it’s the day-to-day environment in which attorneys work that are contributing most to their stress. For example, when the International Bar Association conducted a survey in 2021 and asked attorneys “what more should employers do?", the most common response was that workplaces should address mental health issues by acting to “improve workplace culture,” including “increase levels of openness around wellbeing, create a culture of mutual respects and address poor behavior.”

Most workplaces have responded to mental health concerns with easier fixes. When you learn that your attorneys and staff are experiencing depression and anxiety, it’s far easier to work with your health insurance provider to set up a toll-free number to get assistance than it is to do an examination of your overall culture. It’s far simpler to have a yoga instructor or meditation expert come to the office once a week than it is to determine if your employees feel valued.

Similarly, it’s far more difficult for employers to design environments where women feel supported and have opportunities to advance than it is to send them on a women’s retreat where they discuss goals that have no subsequent follow-through. In short, to change a culture you have to ask hard questions, listen to answers with an open-heart and mind and then do the uncompromising work of getting everyone on board.

It’s impossible to say whether workplace cultures have caused mental health issues in our profession or whether such cultures have simply made existing problems worse. There’s no real way to measure whether cultures are a cause or an effect of an admitted mental health crisis.

But we don’t have to answer that question in order to make changes that could make a real difference. While truly listening is time-consuming and sometimes uncomfortable, creating a profession where men and women can thrive is unquestionably worth it.

It’s clear that whatever we’ve done to date isn’t working. We must do better.

Share Comes Now!

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with others and encourage them to subscribe. I draft it on Beehiiv (Comes Now (beehiiv.com)) and distribute it on Tuesday evening, but also provide the issue as a LinkedIn newsletter on Wednesday mornings.

I used to publish a Thursday issue called What I’m Reading & Thinking but have decided to discontinue that publication in lieu of some writing I want to do related to complex litigation, my “day job.” But don’t worry! I’ll continue to talk about relevant articles and books in future issues of Comes Now.

Have a topic you’d like me to address? Want to tell me where I got something right or wrong? Send me an email at [email protected].