For Mental Health Awareness Week, Legal Week has invited law firm partners to talk about how mental health issues have impacted their careers and the coping strategies they have adopted. Here, partners from a range of firms discuss their experiences

CMS London funds partner Cathy Pitt (pictured above)

I see my therapist about once a month and that's astonishingly helpful; it's the most important thing I do, followed by trying to take a reasonable amount of exercise.

In a previous firm I had some issues. I struggled with a number of things, including underestimating how difficult the transition to partnership is. It's enormously challenging and I had a very unhealthy work ethic, doing very long hours on stressful transactions.

I was also undergoing unsuccessful fertility treatment for a long time and ultimately it all became too much and I had to take some time off for stress that ended up as depression.

I went back to my firm after this and they were really supportive – people are naturally incredibly supportive. I probably should have given them more credit for being understanding and spoken to people earlier.

I didn't talk about it for a long time, but when CMS first started to discuss mental health and were asking for wellbeing ambassadors I thought: 'This is how I can make a difference – by saying that I know what it's like to be depressed and that not being able to cope in the immediate term does not mean you're not suited to the job.' 

Freshfields disputes partner John Blain

I'm very comfortable talking about my own experiences. I've had some periods of real difficulty, mostly to do with work volume. When my children were young I was working very hard – basically only getting home on a Sunday for lunch – and one day, when I finished and was supposed to go back to the office, I literally couldn't step out of the door.

My body wouldn't let me go back to the office. I was a senior associate and I was used to being in control, so this was very hard.

I went to bed for two days then went back to work. Obviously you can't do a year's work and recover in two days, but when I went back I cut down the amount of time I spent working. The quality of my work was never brought into question by partners or clients, and I was able to reintroduce normalisation to my life.

Now, this many years further down the line and leading on major matters like the Volkswagen emissions litigation, my own mental health and the mental health of the teams I manage is something I'm able to look after much more openly and effectively, given my previous experiences.

This was in about 1996 and I didn't tell anyone except my wife. Now, if things were getting to me I would definitely be comfortable telling people. I do it all the time; it's how teams work. On any day you may have people who are feeling better or worse that day, and the rest look after them while they recover. But if someone is finding it hard, it doesn't mean I think they're no longer brilliant.

Magic circle capital markets partner

I once did virtually three all-nighters in a row. I did two all-nighters and then finished at 7pm on the third day.

When I get tired, I tend to fade in and out at around 2am-3am. At one point I faded out while writing out the terms and conditions of a billion-dollar contract. When I woke up, I realised I had written 'my wife is a cat' on the contract… I didn't then have either a wife or a cat.

I think to some extent the stress for me has been less work-related. Tiredness is one thing, but it's been the effect on my family life that has been harder part of it, not being able to be around things going on at home. I have got two kids now at university, but the youngest was born the year I got made partner and I was doing all these privatisations. I was coming home to a frazzled wife handing me a screaming child, saying: 'You deal with it.'

City disputes partner

I qualified into the litigation group in the late 1990s with another trainee and we were immediately expected to work very, very long hours. In some cases, you might have been working on areas that you hadn't worked on for at least 18 months and so were not as familiar with the procedures. We were both thrown in the deep end with little support or sympathy.

After about three months, my fellow newly qualified came to the head of litigation and said: 'I am going on Friday. I can't deal with it. I can't deal with my workload. I've asked for help and it is not forthcoming, I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am not joining another law firm, I am just leaving.'

The response was: 'But you have a three-month notice period?'

He replied: 'No, you don't understand. I am not coming in on Friday.'

And that was it, he just left.

He was definitely close to a breakdown. But what happened afterwards was more alarming. They took his workload, which had driven him to quit the profession, and dumped it on top of my existing workload. It almost pushed me into a breakdown. Looking back, I was probably suffering from depression.

There were tears and overreliance on alcohol. It drove me to leave the firm because I was literally waking up and my stomach was churning at the prospect of going into work on Monday.

I never felt able to tell anyone at work what I was going through. I didn't feel able to. I felt it would count against me. When I was a trainee and very junior, I did not think HR would give me a sympathetic ear.

When I was younger in particular, it would be frantic work and then a huge blowout on the weekend. People did drugs – it was an escape – you'd end up on a Friday night as a group of trainees and NQs and there would be a lot of heavy drinking. All our friends were from work.

I remember my lawyer girlfriend at the time telling me the first thing she would do when she got home was crack open a bottle of wine. I told her she should move firms. She went in-house and things improved massively.

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