An Inside Look at the Depressed, Substance-Abusing World of Law | VICE | Canada

See - An Inside Look at the Depressed, Substance-Abusing World of Law | VICE | Canada


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A key study supporting Seligman's sad verdict is John Hopkins University research showing that lawyers have the highest rate of depression among all occupations, suffering from depression at a rate of 3.6 times higher than non-lawyers.


In my experience, depression in the lawyer world has a particularly underground style to it. Taking sick days is not part of the culture, so it's hard to recycle for a day or two binge-watching Netflix and spooning Ben & Jerry's. For litigators in particular (i.e. those who plead in court and deal directly with clients as opposed to the backend legal researchers and drafters), there's a lot of theatre and often a harsh audience, so you've got to hide your darkness away. For example, one of my mentors was a superstar pleader, a real firecracker, full of bluster and stereotypical lawyer bravado. But once a week he'd close his door and blinds for an hour and later on you can tell he'd been crying. As irony would have it, he once warned me about a senior lawyer I had a file with, a former big-firm shining star and Supreme Court pleader who had a breakdown and now sleeps in his office all week and goes to court unwashed and reeking of body odour. Another solo-practitioner friend of mine, a warm-hearted, bowtie-wearing intellectual who could blow your mind with fancy insights into the history, meaning and purpose of some esoteric statute, would sometimes disappear for weeks at a time.


As for myself, my co-workers would describe me as plucky and playful (I even use emojis and exclamation points in my text messages!), but I take zoloft, see a therapist once a week, write daily thought journals and still my mind gravitates to self-destruction on my way back from court.


We also booze and drug ourselves at a rate greater than twice the national average.


While I had a big-firm buddy pothead who blazed every day after court, cannabis addiction wasn't popular in the suited-and-booted lawyer world. Booze and coke seemed to be the go-tos. A remarkably high proportion of the senior attorneys I dealt with were known to be alcoholics as my mentor would warn me about them, but I developed a knack for detecting them at the courthouse; perpetually flushed and rashy faces, even before they started yelling at you, and a slow or funny gait. The cokeheads skewed younger and something subtle behind the eyes gave them away. A sneaky, snakey and suspiciously gregarious energy coursed through them. I definitely channeled the same vibe the times I did bumps in the office tower bathroom to break writer's block from drafting proceedings all day.


And, yes, we snuff it. Our suicide rate is six times greater than that of the general population.


What makes us so gloomy?


The misery begins in law school, where we're trained to be wet blankets. Seligman speaks of "Pessimistic Explanatory Style" (PES), where bad events are interpreted as "pervasive, permanent, and uncontrollable," in contrast to an optimistic style that sees them as "local, temporary and changeable". PES is not only a principal cause of depression, it's also a productivity and success killer; it makes you perform worse at your job, give up on things prematurely, suck at sports and generally fuck you up.


"Thus, pessimists are losers on many fronts" says Seligman, "but there is one glaring exception: Pessimists do better at law." Pessimists outperform optimists in law school.


Law school trains us to see shit coming from miles away. I studied for years how buying an iPhone, renting an apartment, getting married or posting a comment online could lead to catastrophic injury, imprisonment or bankruptcy.


After law school, we enter the industry with turd-tainted PES glasses and the shit carnival begins in earnest.


Welcome to the scourge of the "billable hour," Mammon's preferred unit of measurement. Most firms' billing targets are approximately 35 billable hours per week, accounting for vacations. My non-lawyer friends often say, "Oh, pshaw, 35 hours of work a week ain't bad." This is where the word "billable" is critical. We can't bill work related to administration, marketing, recruiting, training, mandatory continuing education courses, co-worker schmoozing, eating, urinating, defecating or Facebook stalking. Data shows we bill two hours for every three spent in the office.


The crabs-in-a-bucket law firm structure doesn't help, because the fellow next door who's out-billing gets end-of-year bonus and might steal your partner track. This fosters a twisted culture where colleagues brag about sleeping under their desk to bill late into the night.


No wonder our attrition rate is terrible: more than one third of associates at big law firms quit in their first three years. Young attorneys soon realize that the fancy perks of free smartphones, catered in-office meals and chauffeur services exist to make you a billing machine. You're working in a gilded sweatshop with floor-to-ceiling windows.


Then there's the dispiriting nature of the work itself where the quality of the job I perform can have little to do with the outcome. There are few certainties in litigation. No disrespect to centuries of jurisprudential precision and the hard-won assurance that the rule of law will be applied carefully and fairly but... litigation is often a crapshoot. At the end of the day, you're paying me a lot of money to present your personal problems to some stranger sitting on a bench.


I'm only as effective as my client, and my client is often my worst enemy. As a senior attorney once told me: "Your first assumption is that your client is crazy." People who need attorneys are often conflict-prone personalities. They have trouble obeying rules, cooperating with others and are good at making mistakes. They're also in crisis, so they can be unpleasant and unhappy. They're usually wealthy and with a sense of entitlement to boot. And they're flakey: one day you're their hero, the next day they refuse to pay you, and the day after you have to sue them to collect fees.


The last feature at the shit-carnival is other lawyers, aka "colleagues." I put that word in quotes because we also call them "adversaries," revealing a distressing paradox. Unique among professionals, ours is a zero-sum adversarial system. Scaring, devastating, surprising, misleading and stressing out your enemy-colleague is part of winning. We're trained to not trust anything they say and have everything confirmed in writing.


Now you've seen the carnival, gone on all the rides and feel the bile rising... but you buy another ticket because you've gotta keep up with the Joneses. John and Becky down the hall are billing 60-hour weeks, getting fancy condos and eyeing the corner office. You can't admit weakness in a shark tank. The view of depression as moral weakness is a prevalent thing, particularly in a subculture designed for Type A personalities. So swallow your vomit, rinse with scotch and bill on.


Bar associations are concerned about their morose, substance-addicted little foot soldiers.More than half of all disciplinary actions are against mentally ill or chemically dependent lawyers.


And big firms are also concerned because it eats into their bottom line. The average costof an associate's departure is $315,000 and about 20 percent of payroll is devoted to addressing absenteeism, employee turnover, disability leaves, counseling, medical costs and accidents.


What's being done about all this?


Not much, it seems.


Big firm marketing guys and bar association reps peddle platitudes about work-life balance, alternative dispute resolution models and pro bono encouragement, but let's not kid ourselves: lawyering is a mercenary profession. Litigation rates are increasing,competition for jobs is fierce and firms don't want their worker bees spending more time with their families. We're not in Silicon Valley where a company can make a lot of money on new ideas or disruptive technologies and hence afford to encourage creativity over hours logged.


To me, the system is broken and it's not getting fixed.


Yet I still practice. I didn't put a slug in the chamber or slap on my cement shoes. I picked myself up with some therapy, medication and all that, but my relationship to the profession needed a rework.


But some silly macho complex was holding me back. All this talk about pro bono services, meaningful work, work-life balance meant making less money and resisting the allure of status, power and Harvey Specter-ness. It sounded pretty limp-dick to me.


But the lawyer existence I was chasing was also killing me.


I decided to walk away from my firm, open a solo practice, work fewer hours, work on things unrelated to law and build an alternative online business model selling unbundled legal services to reasonable people at reasonable costs. And my dick works just fine, thank you very much.


There are of course people who are happy practicing law in the meat-grinder model, those who enjoy the carnival. They exist. I've met them. But they're not me and they're unlike a lot of lawyers. They also work with colleagues who struggle with suicidal thoughts, numb with drug and drink and mask their melancholy with witty rejoinders at cocktail parties.


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