LAWYER ASSISTANCE PROGRAM COVID – LIKE ORANGE JUICE CONCENTRATE ROBYNN E. MORAITES, ESQ. | EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NC LAWYER ASSISTANCE PROGRAM
LAWYER WELL-BEING IS A POPULAR REFRAIN THESE DAYS, but what is it really? Lawyer well-being influences and correlates to ethical behavior, professionalism, and competence. It can be tricky to discuss lawyer well-being because there are not objective, measurable well-being standards. We are only alerted that something is amiss when a lawyer begins to have malpractice claims, ethical violations or behaves unprofessionally enough that colleagues start to notice. It is often helpful to frame the discussion on a well-being continuum rather than to think of well-being and impairment as either/or propositions.
Lawyers and judges move along this continuum over the course of a career. Where an individual falls on the continuum at a given point in time can be influenced by a number of factors ranging from the stress of a certain legal matter or life situation, say the death of a close family member, to medically based illnesses like depression or alcoholism – enter stage left…or a global pandemic. By the time a lawyer is committing malpractice or violating the Rules of Professional Conduct, he or she has slid very far down the well-being continuum. The asterisk is an indicator of where a lawyer in a cycle of impairment usually hits the regulator’s radar. Graphically illustrating this another way, here is a slide often used in LAP’s compassion fatigue/burnout CLE presentation: The pandemic has thrown us all into the “Danger Zone of Too Much Stress” and slid all of us further to the left on the well-being continuum. Recent research has verified that the pandemic has taken a far greater toll, emotionally and psychologically, on women and minorities. Across all demographics, anxiety is at an all-time high. We’ve seen a huge rise in day drinking. Where we once were crawling out of our skin from having to suddenly stay at home, research is showing a collective social anxiety about gathering in person again (this is more than feeling awkward…think…dread). All of this makes sense when understood in the larger context of our collective psychology. Deeply embedded in the human psyche is a survival-based instinct around the need to feel in control. For our survival as a species, we rely upon our ability to predict future circumstances. When we can predict, we can then plan and prepare. But when we cannot predict, plan and prepare, our brain takes off in fight-or-flight mode. To our brains, we have spent the last 15 months running for our lives from a saber tooth tiger. We spend a fair amount of time educating the bar about the effects of stress, including the fight-or-flight response. In a great video by Nat Geo entitled Stress: Portrait of a Killer (available on YouTube), the opening scene shows a lion chasing a zebra. It also shows a man holding a briefcase waiting to get on the subway. The narrator explains that for the zebra, the fight-or-flight response is over in about three minutes. Either the zebra has gotten away or it’s over for the zebra. The narrator goes on to explain that the man on the subway is experiencing this heightened sense of fight or flight as well. But what is supposed to be a short-term, acute, survival response is experienced by many of us as a chronic day-in-and-day-out condition. Lawyers and judges are uniquely positioned for a lifetime of this chronic day-in-and-day-out fight-or-flight condition. We often say, and we have published in our law school brochure, “You are having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.” The legal profession is a super abnormal situation, right from the forced-curve get go. With its winner-take-all adversarial nature, its unrelenting demands and the inherently competitive people who are attracted to it, it creates a pronounced and prolonged abnormal situation for its members. And then we added COVID to the mix, which, for many of us, flooded our surge capacity. See, e.g., Your Surge Capacity is Depleted and It’s Why You Feel Awful.
WAKE BAR FLYER
4
THIRD QUARTER 2021
