Lawyers in the United States suffer from elevated anxiety, stress, depression, burnout and problem drinking despite efforts over the past decade to improve attorney wellness and mental health, a new national survey has found.
Nearly 22% of lawyers report moderate to severe symptoms of depression, ?according to the new study, opens new tab the American Bar Association’s Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and lawyer mental health advisory firm Krill Strategies published this week in the Journal of Affective Disorders. Drawn ?from responses of more than 37,000 lawyers, it’s the largest study to date on lawyer wellness, according to the authors.
Bar associations, law firms and other legal employers have stepped up efforts to address lawyer mental health since an earlier version of the study raised alarms in 2016, said study co-author Patrick Krill, but the new data shows that those initiatives have not done enough.
“It shows that the issues were worse than we thought,” Krill told Reuters. “The levels of distress were higher than we knew.”
More than 20% of the surveyed lawyers reported ?moderate to severe levels of anxiety, while nearly 19% reported those levels for stress. More than 41% reported that time in the legal profession has been “detrimental” to their mental health.
The study also found high rates ?of problem drinking among lawyers, with nearly 42% screening positive for hazardous drinking and 26% of those reporting an even higher level of drinking, on an international tool ?used to assess alcohol use.
Prior research has shown lawyers suffer mental health problems at higher rates than the general U.S. population, though the new study does not draw such comparisons.
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