Tali Chernin (1L)
As a part of the professionalism training for 1Ls mandated by the Law Society, we had to answer some questions following our workshop. One question in particular requested this: “List some of the factors that contribute to the heightened levels of problems with substance abuse, depression, and anxiety among lawyers and law students.” But the real kicker was the follow-up: “What are practices you can develop now that might help you deal with these factors?”
That was unreal to me. If you had said that twenty percent of lawyers fell into sinkholes, I would feel comfortable in saying that the Law Society would ask us more than what we’re personally doing to stay out of them. Do yoga to avoid falling into sinkholes. It’s the stop-hitting-yourself model of problem solving, and it sounds a lot like victim blaming.
There are plenty of things we can do to avoid falling into sinkholes. We can work out and create wonderful, supportive networks. We can learn self-defence and walk in pairs. We can do everything right and, you know what, we can still fall into a sinkhole.
The point is we need to talk about why we’re falling into sinkholes. We need to talk about where these sinkholes are coming from. We are well past the belief that falling into sinkholes is a personal failing. So instead of talking about what we’re doing wrong, let’s talk about the system in which we operate.
Let’s talk about the Law Society telling us that our responsibility is first to our client and only second to ourselves. Let’s talk about the increasing number of spaces in law schools despite the insufficient demand for lawyers, which forces students to work harder to compete for an effectively reduced number of positions. Let’s talk about a student workload that seems impossible to achieve, let alone reasonable. Let’s talk about firms that require their lawyers to bill two-thousand hours a year and somehow still have time for meditation and time to unwind.
To suggest that these pressures are our responsibility is to absolve a profession fraught with systemic problems that drive people to substance abuse, to depression, to anxiety, and inevitably out of the profession entirely.
If the administration and the Law Society do a single thing this year to combat mental illness, how about ending the victim blaming around mental illness and accept that these sinkholes aren’t going anywhere until we start filling them?
