Abstract
For some years in the US, the deleterious effects upon the wellbeing of students studying law have been observed and studies repeatedly show that lawyers suffer disproportionately high levels of depression and addiction. In Australia, Courting the Blues and subsequent studies have found that law students also experience a loss of wellbeing after commencing their law studies and that relatively high levels of distress persist after graduation. Studies have also shown that the Australian legal profession is characterised by high levels of depression and addiction. These findings have led to the wellbeing movement in law, a movement led initially by academics and law student associations, but now receiving institutional attention from law schools and law societies. This movement has the potential to affect significant change to law schools and the profession. There are tensions, however, between the dominant neoliberal discourse and the wellbeing movement. In this paper, I argue that the dominance of neoliberal discourse has achieved a remarkable ‘sleight of hand’ that has attributed responsibility, both in terms of cause and solution, to the individual. In so doing, the structural factors implicated in lawyer and law student distress are effectively erased.
Notes
6 The network was established as part of a 2010 Australian Learning and Teaching Council Fellowship awarded to Rachael Field. It hosts a web site: http://wellnessforlaw.com/ and organises an annual national forum.
10 Pilgrim and Bentall (Citation1999, pp 264–265). Kinderman et al (Citation2013. p 2) also highlight the lack of certainty around diagnostic boundaries: ‘depression and anxiety disorders are so comorbid that it is often arbitrary which diagnosis is given to a patient; schizophrenia symptoms are usually accompanied by mood symptoms and overlap with those of bipolar disorder, and it is unclear as to whether bipolar disorder is distinct from major depression’.
15 A point also taken up by Davies and Bansel (Citation2007), p 253.
18 See Fullagar (2009), p 389.
33 ‘[T]here is nothing distinctive or special about education or health; they are services and products like any other, to be traded in the marketplace’: Blum and Ullman (Citation2012, p 368) quoting Peters Citation1999.
41 For instance, Justice Hayne (Citation2002, p 1) has argued that ‘[w]e cannot for a moment delude ourselves into thinking that the commercial element of practising law has emerged only recently. It has always been there’. For similar comments, see Bathurst (Citation2012).
57 Council of Australian Law Deans Working Party (Citation2013).
75 Thornton (Citation2012), particularly Chapter 2, ‘The Market Comes to Law School’.
79 See for instance, Canaan and Shumar (Citation2008), p 10. The suppression of dissent in neoliberalism is an issue explored, particularly, in the work of Henry Giroux. See, for instance, Giroux (Citation2002); and, in relation to the university, Giroux (Citation2004, p 496) where he claims that: ‘[i]ncreasingly dissent in the academy is viewed as […] potential grounds for dismissal’.
80 See, for instance, Hall (Citation2009) who argues that legal academics, through cognitive dissonance and tendencies towards rationalisation, have been unwilling to confront the possibility that their practices may contribute to law student distress.
81 This is not to say that denial has disappeared altogether. Criticism of the methodologies of various empirical studies, including the BMRI report (Kelk et al Citation2009), is a common basis for claiming the problem does not exist.
85 Seto (Citation2012, p 13) observes: ‘[…] lawyers and firms need to recognize that depression is a business problem […]’.
87 Legal Services Commission Queensland (Citation2014). Although the commission acknowledges there is no hard data to this effect, it states that psychological distress is ‘the elephant in the room in a large proportion of the matters’ dealt with by the Commission.
115 my.lawsociety.org.nz/practising-well/depression. Accessed 24 November 2014.
119 In the UK, the high profile report by Laynard et al (Citation2006) argued the need for some 10,000 cognitive behavioural therapists to address depression in the UK.
122 Bell (Citation2004, p 3) notes that 5 million PBS scripts were written in Australia for antidepressants; 8.2 million in 1998; and 12 million in 2003. Fullager and Gattuso (Citation2002, p 10) also note the dominance of drug therapies in Australia in treating depression in women.
123 Bell (Citation2004), p 12. Indeed, Bell (Citation2004, p 59) points out that 200,000 PBS antidepressant prescriptions were written for people in the 16- to 20-year-old age group between 2003 and 2004. Over 14,000 prescriptions were issued for children under the age of 10. This is despite the fact that no antidepressant was, at the time of writing, approved in Australia for the treatment of major depressive disorder in children and adolescents less than 18 years.
132 See, for instance, Australian Law Students’ Association (Citation2009), p 11. Indeed, the Australian Learning and Teaching Council has instituted a national standard requiring students to demonstrate work-life balance before graduation.
142 Dowrick (Citation2013), p 229.This is also a point made by Pilgrim and Bentall (Citation1999, p 266) who note that many non-western cultures have no word for depression; and some have no equivalent word for anxiety. Even where equivalent words do exist, meanings are not always the same.
143 See Todd and Waters (Citation2009, p 361), who note that, in the US, the most common means of addressing law student distress by law schools is to send law students to mental health counselling.
144 This acceptance is the subject of my forthcoming paper on interpellation and wellbeing. Clearly, individual students and lawyers increasingly accept that they have an obligation to monitor and remedy their own distress.
147 Teghtsoonian (Citation2009), p 31. A similar conclusion is reached by Fullager and Gattuso (Citation2002, p 3) in their analysis of depression among women–the emphasis upon biomedical explanations and treatments means that more complex social and cultural factors that shape women's experience remain poorly recognised.
151 Pilgrim and Bentall (Citation1999), p 272. See also Fullager and Gattuso (Citation2002, p 4), who argue in relation to their research into women and depression that contemporary biomedical discourses neglect the individual's emotional experiences of ‘unhappiness, sadness, existential dilemmas, conflicts of identity, boredom and dissatisfaction with gender expectations and the increasingly time-governed order of work-leisure-home-community life’.
![Sample our Law journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5942/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Law.jpg"})