Mental Health and Law: Creating a Sustainable Well-Being Path for Lawyers

If you’re in a firm with a billable hour target of greater than 1,800 hours per year, it’s highly likely that you will have mental illness. That workload is so heavy that it leads people necessarily to sacrifice the crucial determinacies of well-being so family time and friend time and sleep and nutrition and exercise and all of that.

My name is Lynda Collins and I’m a Full Professor with the Common Law section at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. I’m an environmental law scholar but in the past 7 years or so I’ve developed a secondary research interest in law student well-being and happiness.

There has never been more attention to mental health and wellbeing in the legal profession. I think there’s never been a greater need and the momentum to do something about this is unprecedented. I think I learned a lot about personal well-being from studying environmental sustainability so the idea that we don’t go into a forest or an ocean or an agricultural field and just take-take-take-take-take and expect it to continue to produce. But in the legal field we have had the habit of doing that to ourselves to our own brains and bodies and it doesn’t work. You have to apply those same sustainability principles to yourself. Are you investing, you know or are you just harvesting constantly, and we have data that’s showing that the legal profession is much more vulnerable to mental health problems than the general population. So very high levels of anxiety and depression.

The research that’s been done on law students has shown that the problem seems to begin in law school. And for me as a law professor I have come to see mental health literacy and mental health skills as being as fundamental to lawyering as writing and research. To me these are nuts and bolts because these skills underly everything else that you do. So, I started to do a deep dive into that body of research, and I discovered both that there is research showing law school tends to create mental health problems but also this very exciting and very robust body of data showing that we can make changes that improve law student well-being.

The first happiness in the law class in Canada was actually offered at University of Saskatchewan by Professor Marilyn Poitras but there were multiple courses in happiness and law in American law schools and particularly in the top schools and we now have two courses so we have happiness in the law in the first year and we have mindfulness in the law as an upper year January term intensive. For my happiness in the law students I’m looking for two outcomes. One is to develop a level of what I call well-being literacy. So that’s knowledge so that’s understanding cognitively that if I restrict my sleep I’m going to learn less efficiently and less effectively and I’m going to remember less efficiently and effectively. The second is to have experiential learning so I want them to actually experience a shift internally so that they feel what it is to choose an evidence-based intervention and feel the Improvement in their emotional state.

The price that you have to pay for academic and professional success is feeling great, like that’s good news and it’s mostly something I find our students are not aware of they’re such hard workers they’re so conscientious and they’ve trained themselves to sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice but if I’m sacrificing sleep ,exercise, social connection, I’m actually undermining my academic results.

Right now, I’m writing a book for law students and it’s about this connection between well-being and academic success. So, it’s almost like a factum directed at law students just trying to make the case that their best opportunity to succeed academically and professionally is by investing in their own well-being. So, I’m presenting all of this data that I cover in the course and a lot of the skills and techniques that they can use just to try bring the message out to a wider audience. I think happiness in the law or well-being in the law is actually huge growth areas. When you look at the scholarship and workshops and seminars and firm initiatives and Law Society initiatives, they’re really exploding so University of Ottawa has an amazing student group ‘the elephant in the room’ which has done excellent work at raising awareness about mental health issues and providing some of that mental health literacy for students and in the states there’s actually been initiatives at the Ivy League schools where students have collectively gotten together and called on law firms to improve well-being culture in the firms, to kind of let them know if you don’t have a good well-being game you’re not going to attract the best students because this is part of what they’re looking for now. That’s pushing the envelope of traditional legal business models and you know there are firms that are changing things, but it hasn’t completely worked its way into the mainstream although I see signs of it, there’s going to need to be some flexibility and some understanding that a lot of people want more time outside of work.