By Ray Nickson and Alice Neikirk -
A folk wisdom has perpetuated an image of lawyers as unwilling participants in formal mental health measures. According to this image, lawyers avoid counselling, attach a negative stigma to psychological services, and self-medicate in harmful ways.
While all of this no doubt exists in parts of the profession, research published recently in Psychiatry, Psychology and Law presents a different image. Lawyers in this research attached little or no stigma to utilising counselling or psychological services. Many of them had attended counselling, but it did not resonate with them. Instead, lawyers, described assistance from peers and supervisors as more important to their wellbeing than access to employee assistance programs. Peer-to-peer support, management and supervision practices that supported resilience, and space to ‘unload’ were most significant in promoting mental health and wellbeing. In short, many lawyers had already used counselling or psychological services but found them less helpful that conversations with peers and supervisors.
That the legal profession experiences elevated levels of depression and anxiety is well established. Lawyers are at higher risk of suicidal ideation and substance abuse. A source of poor mental health for lawyers is their exposure to materials, clients and experiences that can cause vicarious PTSD and secondary traumatic stress. The risk of vicarious trauma is of particular concern for lawyers working in criminal and family law. Given this concern, it is not surprising that research with lawyers has focused on ill-being and ill-health. Our research began with a focus on ill-being and ill-health, but revealed numerous instances where lawyers were not only surviving but thriving in their work. What we observed in our research with more than fifty legal aid lawyers from the ACT, NT, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, was that lawyers had cultivated vicarious resilience. This did not mean they were unmoved by their experiences. Instead, they recognised the impact their work had on them but had structures in place to support positive adaptations to these professional stressors.
Our research shows that lawyers can develop vicarious resilience when they maintain a sense of meaning in their work while having access to peer-to-peer relationships for support. All this must occur in spaces where supervisors and management provide a culture that fosters vicarious resilience.
Vicarious resilience, like vicarious trauma, is a response to exposure to the trauma of others. A resilient professional thrives not by avoiding an emotional response to their work, but because a strong connection is present between their values, relationships and sense of self. The resilient professional is not an individual character trait: it is not an inherent characteristic of tough lawyers. Instead, it is an adaptation to adverse circumstances and “a description of a pattern, not an individual personality trait”. While the concept of vicarious resilience among helping professions has been observed for almost two decades, it has not typically been used to help us understand how lawyers can mitigate their risk of vicarious trauma.
We spoke with newly minted lawyers and lawyers with decades of professional practice. In every jurisdiction lawyers described negative personal effects of working in the criminal justice system. Symptoms of vicarious trauma – including hypervigiliance, altered sleep, changes to behaviour and intrusive thoughts – were all shared in interviews. The risk of vicarious trauma, and its contribution to burnout and departure from the profession, were real. To successfully minimise those risks, lawyers in our study typically relied on the existence of peer-to-peer support.
It was peers, not professional counsellors, that lawyers saw as the most valuable resource in maintaining their resilience at work.
Every lawyer in every office had access to professional counselling and psychological support through an employee assistance program. Yet this individual support often served to entrench the idea that psychological harm and burnout were individual problems. In reality, these responses often reflect broader issues in the criminal justice system and profession that were beyond the influence of an individual lawyer. In this context it was ‘debriefing’ between colleagues that lawyers found most beneficial to their mental health and wellbeing. This ‘debriefing’ is not to be confused with a formal session with a counsellor following an individual incident. Lawyers instead were describing the opportunity to have informal conversations with peers, mentors and supervisors. These were organic conversations during or after work. It was peers, not professional counsellors, that lawyers saw as the most valuable resource in maintaining their resilience at work.
In offices where the opportunity for these conversations was limited, participants described greater risks of vicarious trauma. This included where lawyers had been separated on different floors in the same building and were unable to connect with each other. In another example, lawyers had been co-located with administrative staff. When lawyers sought to debrief with each other, administrative staff complained about their own exposure to distressing content and lawyers were instructed not to have these conversations in the shared office. Lawyers typically described courts as unsuitable locations for these conversations. When the office became unavailable for this purpose, access to their preferred form of professional support was diminished.
If legal employers are committed to the mental health of their staff, then office spaces that permit these interactions should be a factor.
An important lesson from this research is that space matters. While this is not the first research to identify space as influential on mental health at work, it does highlight how important it is to developing vicarious resilience in helping professions such as law. Lawyers need space to talk. Those conversations will often include ‘unloading’ of distressing experiences from the day. If legal employers are committed to the mental health of their staff, then office spaces that permit these interactions should be a factor.
A necessary correlate of space was time. Lawyers also needed the time for these conversations to occur. While our research indicates that the supervisor was not usually considered the right person to debrief with, they were essential in creating environments where time was available to step away from duties and have these conversations.
Supervisors were influential in helping lawyers develop vicarious resilience. We observed many instances of exemplary supervisors. They knew their staff well and staff trusted that their supervisors could tell when early signs of stress appeared. Supervisors would encourage staff to refresh, debrief, and even modify the cases assigned to them for work. Curation of caseloads by supervisors for junior staff was essential in helping foster vicarious resilience among new lawyers. This was a feature of the most resilient offices in our research.
One supervisor we spoke with noted that this curation of caseloads provided new lawyers with time to build the peer-to-peer networks and supports that would help develop their resilience. The most effective supervisors normalised, as well, that cases would be emotionally challenging, that there would be tough days in court, that clients or the bench might make life difficult at times. It was normal to have a response to these events. Supervisors who signalled that seeking support at these times was healthy typically oversaw the most resilient offices.
Regrettably, supervisors and senior lawyers had fewer opportunities for the types of debriefing all lawyers identified as helpful. This was compounded by the experience of supervisors and senior lawyers taking on additional caseloads to assist new lawyers’ entry into the profession. Lawyers in these roles often identified opportunities to serve in law reform, legal policy, and related capacities as beneficial in preserving their resilience. These opportunities provided additional ways to maintain a sense of meaning and contribution, even following many years of service in a criminal justice system that has changed little in that time. This suggests that employers and the profession more broadly should more actively consider how mid-career and senior lawyers can be provided with additional opportunities to serve in roles that help support the maintenance of vicarious resilience.
A further protective factor that helped develop vicarious resilience reflected the motivations for becoming a lawyer in the first place. We spoke with lawyers at Legal Aid commissions across Australia. Those lawyers had joined with a sense of purpose and a commitment to values of social justice and access to justice. When they were able to find continued meaning for these values in their work, their resilience was improved. Ensuring that the work remains meaningful for lawyers can sustain and foster vicarious resilience. For junior lawyers, this was often in the day-to-day practice of representing indigent accused. For more senior lawyers and supervisors, it was in the mentoring they provided and their service to related causes outside their law office. While resilience was shaped by peer-to-peer supports, it was also built on a foundation of finding meaning in their work.
In developing and sustaining resilience among lawyers, the profession could learn from models in the health sector. A resiliency model developed for emergency department and intensive care units in hospitals recognised that staff did not want to speak with formal counsellors (Cipriano et al 2022). Instead, that model strengthened peer-to-peer support networks. Counsellors and mental health professionals helped design training so that peer-to-peer networks acted as the first safety net for staff. In this way, colleagues could recognise the impacts of exposure to trauma, better identify when their colleagues were not coping, and had tools to assist in early intervention to reduce the likelihood of escalation of poor health.
More research is needed in what makes peer-to-peer support effective, especially in the legal profession. There is evidence, however, that this support can have the most purchase and influence among lawyers. This does not diminish the role for professional counselling and psychologists. Nor does it negate their importance in responding to significant instances of poor mental health and wellbeing. It is clear, though, that greater emphasis should be placed on how to support what lawyers are identifying as a key aspect of their well-being: peer-to-peer support.
The Law Society of New South Wales has several resources for legal organisations looking to support the wellbeing of their solicitors. While the Solicitor Wellbeing Service offers confidential, no-cost therapy services to all NSW solicitors, we also offer a Solicitor Mentoring Program to facilitate stronger peer support within the profession, as well as seminars and training programs on workplace culture, psychosocial safety for solicitors, and leadership development. For more information, please visit our Growth and Wellbeing Hub, or contact customerservice@lawsociety.com.au.
