Our Firm Doesn’t Have to Worry about Mental Health
Many Leaders Still Believe Mental Health is Not a Problem in Their Office
Have you met attorneys whose firms don’t have a mental health issue? They need not worry because they hire strong, resilient lawyers who can handle the job. Attorneys work in a cutthroat profession. It’s bad that our employees are prepared? They ask.
Many higher-ups at law firms still ask questions like these despite all the recent initiatives and efforts for mental health and mental illness awareness. Some attorneys still believe they work at the magic law firm where no one has burnout, no one has too much stress, and everyone manages the stress they do encounter flawlessly. Even more impressive, these attorneys achieve their impeccable mental health even though the firm does absolutely nothing to promote a mentally healthy workplace. It’s not that they don’t care, because OF COURSE they care about mental health.
It’s just not an issue at their firm because their employees have their mental health under control. They just don’t need to take extra steps because their employees meet the criteria for practicing law. They don’t need to do expend their resources to a cause with which their employees need no help. But that’s not reality. Maybe these employees don’t disclose any mental health challenges, but that doesn’t mean no one deals with them. The belief that no one at a particular workplace has mental health challenges creates a hazardous expectation of perfection, and attorneys already tend to strive for perfection to the point that it becomes dangerous. So nobody, especially the people in charge, should contribute to that or possibly make it worse.
How can leadership teams really believe that nobody in their entire workplaces has a mental health challenge? How can people hear statistics that demonstrate that one out of every five people have a mental health challenge and still believe that they’ve never hired any of those people? I definitely encounter professionals with this belief regularly. People who have no personal experience with mental health challenges and haven’t educated themselves on the subject naturally will not know the signs a person with a mental health challenge might exhibit. They won’t know what to look for and they may assume that if nobody discloses mental health issues to them, then nobody has any mental health issues. This can create a viscous cycle in the workplace.
Often people experiencing mental health challenges can sense if their leaders aren’t open-minded to creating a mentally healthy workplace. Sometimes, people may even be apprehensive to trust leaders who have made efforts to improve mental health at work. It’s still not an easy subject to bring up, which is why we have to try as hard as we can to make people feel comfortable talking about mental health.
For me this includes posting about mental health on social media even if some people may see that as taboo. If people still consider mental health discussion taboo, then we still have work to do. If people claim they don’t think mental health discussion is taboo, but it’s just inappropriate for LinkedIn because it’s a professional platform, then we still have work to do. I would love to help anyone in the legal field do that work so that we can do a better job creating mentally healthy workplaces in our field and I am proud of that and exploring how to do more. If you or anyone else could use my help, please let me know.