Luke Finn, a third-year law student at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, founded a student organization dedicated to mental health and wellness. (Courtesy photo)
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Luke Finn expected to find a robust network of mental health supports in place when he showed up at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in 2017.

He assumed an American campus would be more attuned to wellness than schools in his native U.K., where stiff-upper-lip attitudes prevail. Instead, he was underwhelmed by what he found offered at the Chicago law school.

"As a 1L, it seemed obvious to me that people needed something they weren't getting," said Finn, who is open with classmates about his own struggles with depression. "There were people having anxiety attacks by October."

Rather than complain about what he viewed as a lack of programming centered on mental health and wellness, Finn decided to do something about it. In his first semester he started the Students Mental Health Alliance—a student-run organization dedicated to wellness programming, education, counseling access and other supports. It began as informal peer counseling, but the 18-month-old group now produces a variety of events from mental health panels and sessions timed to especially stressful periods of the academic year—finals, for example—to a weekly email to all Northwestern law students listing wellness events and resources. The group even partnered with Illinois Lawyers Assistance Program to double the amount of on-campus counseling offered.

Northwestern is hardly the only law campus where students have assumed the mantle of mental health advocacy. Across the country, a growing cohort of law students are pushing administrators to invest more in wellness initiatives. Students are also holding events, forming their own wellness organizations and securing funding. At the same time, students appear more eager to participate in mental health programs led by peers, rather than administrators.

Of note is the Facebook group that Finn started last year—the Law Students Mental Health National Alliance, which now counts nearly 400 members—where students share tips on starting mental health organizations, dealing with law school administrators and lobbying for changes to the character and fitness review process. 

Katherine Bender, who heads up the Dave Nee Foundation's law school outreach program Uncommon Counsel, said she has seen an increase in the number of students taking an active role in mental health and wellness on their campuses and advocating for more resources. She pointed to a 2016 survey of law student well-being, which found elevated rates of anxiety and substance abuse among the law student population, as a catalyst for these initiatives.

In late 2017, student bar association leaders from 13 top-20 law schools signed a pledge to improve mental health on law school campuses and rejected the notion that law school needs to be a "grueling and overwhelming ordeal" in order to prepare students for a career in the legal profession.

"Poor student or practitioner health is not a necessary byproduct of a rigorous legal education and needs to be treated as the scourge of the profession that it is," they wrote. "Students left behind are not failures of personal strength. They are testaments to our collective failure to uplift one another and raise the standards of our trade."

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Pioneer in the Space

Yale Law School's Mental Health Alliance has been a pioneer in the space of student-led mental health advocacy. It launched in 2014 as an informal group of students concerned about long wait times for counseling appointments and feelings of isolation on campus. They surveyed 300 law students that year and found that 70% said they had experienced a mental health challenge while in law school, yet 30% of them were unwilling to seek help. That data has helped quantify the wellness challenges and focus the alliance's advocacy efforts in the following years.

Some law students working on mental health initiatives credit their administrations with trying to broach the topic and provide resources and assistance, while others say student wellness seems to fall to the bottom of the priority list for deans.

But there is near-universal agreement that wellness initiatives originating from students tend to be more successful than top-down programs because students are more willing to be open with their peers than with administrators.

A mental health initiative set up by the dean of students at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey, last year wasn't as successful as it could have been, in part because it was initiated by the administration, said Deven Amin, an incoming second-year student who founded the school's Students Mental Health Alliance last spring.

She said one of the most effective parts of the program happened during orientation, when all faculty left the room and new students had the chance to talk directly with upperclassman about their experience and their concerns.

With the Rutgers alliance now heading into its first full year, Amin said it plans to conduct a mental health survey of the student body; launch a weekly wellness email for all students; host a recurring yoga class; and bring in speakers.

"As a first-year coming in, law school was kind of a shock," Amin said. "It's not like undergrad. It's a very different experience. People in law school mostly have Type A personalities who are vying to be in the top 10% of the class. And 90% of the student body won't be in that top 10%. Within that first semester, I started to see the anxiety and depression begin to settle in with the students. There wasn't anything on campus to necessarily deal with that."

Strict grading curves aren't the only thing that makes law school a powder keg of stress and anxiety, according to students. The pervasive use of the Socratic Method—essentially cold-calling students in class—is a constant stressor.

Also anxiety-provoking are the perceived high stakes of each progression.

"If you don't do well on the LSAT, you don't get into the right school. If you don't do well in the right school, you won't get the Big Law job you're meant to want to get," said Northwestern's Finn. "My read on it is that, particularly if you're in a school with a curve—which is the vast majority of them—from the day you start, you are in constant competition with everyone around you. That's isolating. It's awful for people's mental health."

The way Luna Martinez sees it, mental health is a matter of life and death at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. The Bay Area campus has been rocked by student suicides for at least the past three years, said Martinez, an incoming third-year student. Despite those deaths, she says the administration hasn't done enough to ensure students get the mental health support they need. The school, for example, doesn't have a counselor specifically trained to deal with the law student population and the unique circumstances they face. (It does have a part-time counselor who comes to the law campus.)

Securing a specialized, full-time counselor is one of the goals of the Peer Wellness Coalition—a student group Martinez founded in 2017. The coalition secured a $56,000 two-year grant from the University of California to provide mental health programming at the law school. Thus far, the coalition has hosted a decompression room for students during the law firm on-campus interviewing process, supported events without alcohol, held informational sessions on how to safely use controlled substances and held sessions focused on how to navigate intrapersonal relationships. It has also given money to a variety of other campus organizations and affinity groups to enable them to offer their own wellness programming.

"Students are only taking on this work, because if we don't show up for each other and support each other, no one will," Martinez said. "It really started to feel like a dire situation when we began to lose our peers to suicide."

Mariana Grammenos would also love to see a dedicated counselor on her law campus—Barry University Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law in Orlando. Grammenos, an incoming second-year student, came to law school with a master's degree in mental health counseling and was struck by how little mental health issues are discussed on campus.

"I see people who I go to school with who have never talked about their mental health before, who get dropped into this high-pressure environment where you're expected to perform at such a high level," she said. "It brings people to their breaking point, and I don't really see an outlet at this school that's helping them with that."

Barry doesn't yet have a student group dedicated to wellness, but Grammenos has spoken to her adviser about starting one in the coming year. The Law Students National Mental Health Alliance has been a helpful source of information and inspiration about what students can achieve when they take the lead, she said.

Kimberly Andrews will spend the upcoming school year as the mental health director of the University of Baltimore School of Law's Student Bar Association—a relatively new position created to coordinate wellness efforts and advocate for more resources from the administration. Andrews started three years ago as an evening student, just as the university eliminated its internal counseling services amid budget cuts and outsourced counseling to an off-campus third-party provider.

Baltimore's Student Bar Association surveyed law students about the counseling services and found that many students were unsatisfied, with some never getting called back after asking for help. That led the creation of the new mental health director position.

"Really we're trying to fill in the gaps of what the school is not doing," Andrews said. "We've done yoga events and meditation. We post resources for students around finals. We're really limited in what we can do due to budgets. We're trying to expand this year to get some speakers and workshops."

The Student Bar Association is also working to eliminate questions on Maryland's character and fitness review pertaining to disabilities and mental conditions—a disclosure that can dissuade law students from seeking help altogether. Virginia dropped mental health questions from its admissions application earlier this year after students from the state's law campuses banded together to push the change. Activists from those schools are now sharing notes to help their counterparts in other jurisdictions, Andrews said.

While mental health challenges remained stigmatized in the legal profession, changing attitudes among millennials are helping to turn the tide, said Finn. Today's law students have come up through more supportive undergraduate environments and in general are more comfortable discussing mental wellness.

"There was some resistance when I started on this issue, rooted in the idea that it will make the school look bad if you are doing an activist-y mental health thing," he said, noting that Northwestern's current dean, Kimberly Yuracko, has been receptive to his advocacy. "I think there's a realization now that actually it's a good thing. If you're trying to recruit the best or most mature students, then showing that you take people's emotional and mental health seriously is a selling point."