'It's okay to take a break, the world won’t end': lawyers see 'sea change' in attitude to mental health support
With legal professionals facing a world of ever-growing case volume and complexity, there has been a “sea change” in how practitioners approach counselling and support services, but the structure of the legal profession as a whole needs to continue being reviewed, a Law Society director has said.
Although there are a greater array of tools available than ever before to promote professional wellbeing, many practitioners still struggle to share their problems while balancing case loads and difficult clients with their personal lives.
Antoinette Moriarty, Director of Solicitor Services, says that the integrity of the justice system itself rests upon lawyers maintaining their well being.
“If you think about the judiciary, if they are overloaded with work – not having rest time, not having an opportunity to reflect deeply, even occasionally – you can imagine the fatigue that would set in to your decision making.
“It’s pretty fundamental to me that people have the scaffolding while they’re well to maintain that wellness over the period of their careers.”
Antoinette emphasises that law professionals can be presented with incredibly challenging work and process what at times can be case material of a horrifying nature. Although some are able to speak with counsellors and debrief, many feel like they need to figure it out alone.
“If you continue to feed them with work, increase the pace and the complexity and don’t increase the scaffolding to keep up with that, it’s no surprise that over time the material about other people’s trauma becomes lodged in the professionals that are coming into contact with it.
“It’s not the same thing as the person who’s experienced the event in the first instance, it is vicarious, but it actually is quite debilitating, particularly over time.
She adds that the experience of practitioners must always be contextualised. “I think we have to be really careful about terms like vicarious trauma because in a way it almost dehumanises the experience again. I try to avoid, as far as possible, the terminology of trauma, because actually what you are having is a perfectly normal healthy response to something that is not perfectly normal and healthy.”
Antoinette says that younger trainees often have a high capacity to speak to each other about counselling.
“The most joyful part of being involved in providing a counselling framework is to hear young men in particular shout across a busy space, ‘I can’t see you now because I’m going down to see my counsellor’, she recounts.
“I think counselling really would have been [in the past] considered to be for anybody who was in real mental distress.
“The biggest sea change is this service is now understood as something you go to while well, but curious,” she says.
“It’s a space with a professional who is interested in you. They don’t have a position on what you bring and are never going to share the content of that session with another person. Who is there to try to enable you to think deeply about your purpose, your mission.
“We’ve been very intentional in our influencing of that change from being something you might avail of if you have a bereavement, or if you have a period of being depressed or highly anxious”. But now she says about “90 per cent of trainees availing of our counselling service are probably as well as they will ever be psychologically and emotionally and mentally.”
Corporate Challenges
Antoinette also notes that bewilderment about workplace hierarchies, or even being terrified by the idea of signing a legal document, are normal experiences for professionals entering or changing their work environment.
“Those are very ordinary, healthy human fears but they can become quite pernicious if they are not freed up, loosened up a little bit and understood as ordinary and to be expected. That is the first point of contact with us, where we say: ‘But of course.’
Although there is an expectation that lawyers will be challenged by criminal case material, Antoinette cautions that there is also a huge emotional toll to corporate work.
“There’s kind of a myth that all of the hard end stuff happens in the human – the family and child law, the immigration, refugee work – of course that’s absolutely true.
“However, if you go into any large legal workplace and you sit with people, you’ll very quickly observe that the demand placed on many of them has an impact on mental health and wellbeing too.
“It’s things like burnout, becoming cynical about the work, becoming less willing or able to actually look after the people that you might be leading, alongside the client work. You have to almost do a trade-off and there is a cost of that to people, as professionals but also as humans.
“You may have joined the profession wanting to mentor and coach and guide and nurture and then suddenly you’re doing 14 hour days and not replenishing. It becomes very difficult to do both.
“I think the way the profession is structured at all levels needs to be, and is being, reviewed.”
‘No one’s ever asked me’
Human rights lawyer Cristina Stamatescu says that everyone in the legal profession should have the confidence to reach out for help.
The sole practitioner points out that lawyers are often the first person a client may have opened up to. When she talks to clients about their personal struggles, she says she often gets the same answer: “No one’s asked me”.
As a result, lawyers can find themselves engaging with clients who have suffered significant trauma in their lives. “There’s different levels of torture that people would have experienced. For example in international protection claims, they’ve never disclosed it because they’ve never sat across from someone that they could build up a relationship with.”
“I cry a lot, because it’s just getting life changing results for people that have been extremely, extremely traumatised,” she says. “Purely physical and psychological torture; they been in this country maybe for two, three four years and they’ve never mentioned it.
“They’re attending hearings, the judge gives out asking ‘Why have you not said this before?’. They say ‘It’s because no one’s asked me and until I met Christina, no one’s ever asked me this’.”
Law professionals, she says, must first be cognisant of their own wellbeing in order to fulfil their professional duties: “It’s absolutely important, and I think that’s part of Antoinette’s work, to remind us to be aware that we would need that support, we need to mind ourselves so that we can mind other people”.
‘It’s absolutely okay to take a break’
The aspect of her work that Christina finds the most difficult is telling a client who came to her with hope that there is nothing that she can do for them.
“Difficult clients I think they are people that are frustrated, upset, they don’t know what’s happening, they just want some sort of solution, they want help.
“They’re angry probably or difficult because they haven’t got any progress until the moment they come through the door.
“I do believe the most difficult times when they come through the door for the initial consultation, for which they would pay, and you’re telling them you can’t help.
“It’s rare but it happens, that I don’t have an answer for them, that I believe that they don’t have a legal remedy and I can’t help them. I won’t put in a random application to take their money, that’s absolutely never happening unless I believe there’s something I can do.”
Christina says that throughout her work in crime, family and employment as well as general practice law, there isn’t anywhere that has the same community as the asylum and immigration list.
“They’re such a great community where we don’t differentiate between applicant and respondent.
“I know with confidence that I can pick up the call and discuss with a colleague about a particular case, or call my opposite number. There is that trust that you have that you can discuss about the case or talk about the day with another colleague as you meet them in the coffee shop.”
Christina says that this collegiality is a safe space, but it cannot replace the level of support provided for by a counsellor.
“I think there is a certain vulnerability that you would expose yourself to by talking to a colleague. There is a limit to how much you can talk to a colleague, but of course it is better than nothing.
“It has kept us going and to be able to talk and address and see there’s common ground. It’s not just you and other people experience similar difficulties, maybe with a legal point, or with a client or approach.”
Having the confidence to reach out for help is difficult but should always be encouraged, the solicitor says.
She says that those in the legal profession need to “accept that there’s no failure whatsoever for being vulnerable or feeling that your pores are saturated with work and that we need a break”.
“It’s absolutely normal to reach out to a colleague, to the Law Society and Antoinette and to a family member and it’s absolutely okay to take a break: the world won’t end.
“I’ve recently learned that it’s okay to say ‘no’ to work and it’s okay to set your own boundaries and limits. There’s a huge world out there, all you need to do is just to lift your head and look around you, because it is a lot.
“It’s not a matter of giving up, you just need a break.”
Funded by the Courts Reporting Scheme
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