One of my projects this year as news editor is to include at least one piece per issue that is, in one way or another, connected to mental health at the law school and within the profession. When it was first suggested that I write about the drinking culture at the law school, I had mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I think it’s something that we need to talk about more. Drinking is without a doubt the default when it comes to socializing at the law school. No, this is not something that is unique to the law school – it’s the norm in Western culture, particularly at universities. I get that. And I don’t think that many of us are drinking like 19 year old engineering students at Queen’s. But if you think that the only time you need to talk about alcohol consumption is when people are doing it every day or by themselves, then I respectfully disagree with you.
On the other hand, I was concerned that people were unwilling to give our collective relationship with alcohol serious thought at this stage of their lives. Moreover, I was concerned that if I was the one who wrote the article no one would take it seriously. For better or for worse, my identity at the law school is connected with the pub night scene. I was leaning towards not including myself among the article’s co-authors in order to protect the integrity of the piece, lest anyone write off the article because I was involved in drafting it.
It turns out that my concerns were unfounded. I decided to forgo anonymity as an author and start asking around for comments on the drinking culture at the faculty. As I did so I was shocked by how interested people were in the article. Not only were people very supportive of the fact that I was writing the article, but a number of them were willing to offer comments on the issue of alcohol – some of them very personal. It does not take much prompting for people to open up, and once they do they have a lot to say.
I’m not going to lecture anyone on responsible drinking – it’s not my place to do so. What I am willing to put out there is that we need to talk about drinking more. It’s important to talk about our drinking habits because they are habits. They are habits that play a significant role in molding how we interact and work with one another, and we should be more conscious of any habit that has the power to do this. It’s very difficult to gain that awareness if we are not comfortable discussing it with one another.
