This is the second part in a three-part series on pain points within the legal profession that have caused higher rates of mental health problems and addiction. You can read part one, on sleep deprivation, here.

Few would deny the stresses and pressures that come with being a lawyer.

Yet few feel comfortable admitting when those pressures become too much.

One result? Loneliness.

"It's beautiful to overtly name the emotion," said Rebecca Simon, a law professor and  a co-founder of the Mindfulness, Stress Management and Peak Performance Program at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

"The loneliness, lack of meaning… That's why people are turning to all these coping mechanisms and ending their lives and having anxiety and depression," Simon said, referring to the alarming rates of substance abuse and mental health struggles in the profession. 

Patrick Krill, founder of Krill Strategies, who has dedicated much of his career to mental health in the law, said a major driver of the behavioural health problems in the legal profession is "a lack of collegiality or a lack of mutual support".

"People feel they can't talk to anybody," he said.

That comes from a variety of sources – a lack of civility in a line of work that's adversarial by nature; decreasing connections between lawyers and their firms as lateral movement increases; and a primary focus on billing hours, often a solitary task, to bring in revenue and boost profits. 

"The sense of isolation and loneliness that many lawyers feel… that's real," Krill said. "We need to be aware of that and look for ways to allow people to feel more supported… to make them feel more like part of a team instead of widgets in an office."

Dan Lukasik, founder of LawyersWithDepression.com, and director of workplace wellbeing for the Mental Health Association in Buffalo, New York, said loneliness is an "epidemic' nationally, and part of "a broader cultural trend that is more concentrated in the law". And reliance on technology is a contributor.

"There are opportunities throughout the day to have interactions or bond with people – those are taken away," Lukasik said.

That practice has increased over time and, as discussed previously in this series, also creates a decreased ability to detach from work and get needed rest.

But mental health professionals and legal consultants said there are distinct characteristics of practising law that pile on, creating at times a truly lonely existence.

Expectations and Reality

Tyger Latham, a clinical psychologist who has many lawyers among his clients, said ambitious young lawyers often find soon after graduating from law school that their new profession falls short of their dreams.

"A lot of attorneys genuinely had various fantasies of really trying to help people and make society better, and then they find themselves in these jobs that are at times mind-numbing, that are not intellectually stimulating, they're representing clients at some times that they're morally [averse] to," Latham said.

This, he said, can create an "existential crisis".

In Big Law particularly, earning the most money often becomes an overriding ambition, whether as a result of a competitive nature or massive student loans, or a combination of the two.

"The actual prestige of the firm now is wrapped up in this metric of profits per partner or revenue," said William Meyerhofer, a psychotherapist and former practising lawyer. "The kids actually pick their firms based on their prestige, which firm earns the most," which are also the firms with the greatest billable hour requirements.

But falling short of those requirements, or struggling to meet them, creates a loneliness in itself.

Some lawyers – particularly those who got into the profession because they saw it as their 'calling' – may not ever experience that feeling of failure and the resulting loneliness, Meyerhofer said. But many others went to law school because they saw an opportunity to put an academic mind to good use in a well-paying profession, he said.

"The worst thing is when you've invested all that time and self into school, then you get into Big Law and you feel like you're failing," Meyerhofer said.

Katie Herzog, a former psychology professor who consults law firms and other businesses on training and management, said a lack of communication between management and lawyers can even make valuable contributions seem inconsequential, and therefore unrewarding. The work itself may be meaningful, but the lawyers doing it don't feel as if their part in the work has any meaning.

For the younger lawyers, "not feeling valued for what they're doing… is contributing to that feeling of just being a cog in the wheel", she said.

Dr. Elizabeth Tillinghast, a psychiatrist and former practising lawyer, likened it to "factory work".

"Each person has a little piece of it… it can be hard to feel like you're really part of anything," she said.

It's not just something experienced by attorneys billing hours. Isolation is a reality for lawyers in various roles, said Eileen Travis, director of the New York City Bar Association's Lawyer Assistance Program.

In-house, lawyers are frequently dealing with the pressures of having a tremendous amount of responsibility fall on a few shoulders, Travis said. There's also a widely held belief that in-house lawyers have more control over their schedules, said Krill. But reality often does not align with that.

Solo practitioners and small firm lawyers "just feel like they're alone against the world", Meyerhofer said, as they face the demands of clients and contest with opposing counsel, all while trying to run a business. "It can be very lonely. You just feel besieged."

Government lawyers, particularly prosecutors and public defenders, are frequently dealing with another issue, Travis said: vicarious trauma.

"When you constantly hear clients talking about their trauma, you develop this secondary condition, which can be just as severe as post-traumatic stress disorder," Travis said. "A lot of lawyers that work in government… struggle with the fact that there's very little they can do for their clients."

And being a litigator specifically, whether that's at a firm, in-house, for the government or in solo practice, can create habits that are harmful outside the workplace, Simon said. Litigators can often fall into a pattern of vilification, always looking to tear apart an opposing argument.

"And then it bleeds into your family relationships, your friends, and it turns on yourself as well," she said.

Jarrett Green, a wellness consultant to law firms who co-founded the mindfulness programme at USC Gould with Simon, described this tendency as "professional pessimism". It's useful in the context of a lawyer's practice, but harmful when it takes over outside the job.

"Lawyers need to be told this, it needs to be overt, that the things that make you successful professionally can make you sick emotionally," Green said.

Those adversarial ways can spill into the workplace culture as well, creating another barrier to supportive relationships with colleagues and mentors.

"When you have people who are trained to be aggressive with each other, it can actually be quite destructive," Latham said.

And all of those problems grow when lawyers at any stage feel uncomfortable, or even discouraged, from expressing those feelings.

'I'm the only one'

"One of the key issues we've seen in the legal profession is that it isn't safe to be emotional, because it's seen as a weakness," Simon said. "There is a sense of loneliness, isolation, sadness, that I'm the only one who can't handle it."

But even if it were encouraged, in many settings there just isn't time for lawyers to create those relationships.

"I do hear from a lot of early-career associates that their work, by the nature of their work, document review and so on, often precludes them from having sustained interaction with colleagues," Latham said. And working alone for too long can distort a person's thought processes.

"You can imagine the scenario of the overworked associate working by themselves, they're quite literally in their head. And depending on what's in their head, it can be problematic," Latham said.

Mental health professionals universally pointed to fostering relationships as an important step in addressing depression and other mental health struggles in the legal profession.

"If I have one mission in life, in what I do for a living, it's to get lawyers to open that office door, close it behind them and sit and talk together," Meyerhofer said.

Those conversations should allow them to build both peer relationships and mentorship.

Travis said she often hears from associates that they're not getting the mentoring they need. "They either get none, or they're working as part of a team under a partner who basically throws the work at them," she said.

That may be a result of partners simply not knowing how to mentor younger lawyers, Herzog suggested.

"Most people who supervise associates have never had any training in it," she said. "There's not a thoughtfulness about the impact of their behaviour on others."

And, like Meyerhofer, Herzog said it's crucial that firms create opportunities for people to connect, even with something as simple as a regular brown-bag lunch.

"Friendships within firms, especially when they spend the majority of their waking hours there, are extremely important," she said.

Even when the legal work is at its most tedious, Green said, creating connections to other individuals, or better yet, a team, can go a long way in helping lawyers find meaning in that work.

"What we try to show lawyers is: 'How can I attach this to a higher purpose?'" Green said.

The next and final part of this series will discuss the workplace culture that leads to overwork and isolation, and how legal employers can begin to make meaningful change.

Read More

Minds Over Matters: An Examination of Mental Health in the Legal Profession