ABA Offers Free Program on Preventing Suicide

onMay 11, 2009 at 12:24 PMMarch 18, 2010 at 4:22 PM

We’ve reported on two suicides that have happened in the legal community after attorneys have lost their jobs. The National Law Journal reports on another apparent suicide that occurred in December at King & Spalding.
Is the recession economy pushing lawyers over the edge, or is it the just the general stress of the profession?

It is difficult to gauge whether these three recent deaths indicate a rise in attorney suicides; recent statistics are hard to come by. And it has been more than 20 years since the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety released a study that ranked lawyers fifth among workers in the frequency with which they commit suicide. Psychologists and attorneys, however, say factors in the profession that may contribute to suicide have likely grown worse, not better. Lawyers, they say, may be primed for depression because of their heavy workload and legal training that accentuates the negative.
“We really, as lawyers, are dunked into a bath of stress,” said Dan Lukasik, a trial lawyer whose Web site Lawyers with Depression has seen a 50 percent jump in hits in the past six months. “You’re sitting there stewing in your own stress chemicals and that goes on for years.”

After the jump, the ABA offers some resources for those who are confronting depression.

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To the extent that suicide is a problem (emerging or constant) in the legal profession, law firms themselves don’t seem particularly equipped to tackle the problem head on:

Of 12 large law firms contacted for information about counseling or treatment services they provide for lawyers, including many that have cut attorneys and staff, 10 declined to comment or did not return calls. Nearly all major law firms have employee assistance programs, in which staff and attorneys have access to counselors who can help them with mental health and substance abuse programs. Still, firms don’t seem to have expanded such services since the economic downturn hit.

If this is a problem, the we need our professional governing body to try to help. This morning, the ABA made a potentially helpful program available for free. Here’s the email announcement from Rick Vittenson, the director of the ABA Center for CLE:

I wanted to let you know that [the] request to make the program entitled “What Lawyers Need to Know About Suicide During a Recession: Prevention, Identity and Law Firm Responsibility” available free of charge did not go unheeded.
The program’s sponsors have agreed to make the program free as a download, including audio and program materials. Within 24 hours, the program should be available through the ABA Web Store, the ABA-CLE web pages, and the ABA’s Economic Recession Recovery pages.