Lawyers, Trauma, and Professional Well-Being: How the Legal Community Takes Back its Mental Health

Accompanying a notable shift in the legal academy to being more attentive to our students’ mental health, there must be an equal (or even greater) shift to focusing on trauma, mental health, and well-being in the broader profession. Significantly, trauma and its effects are compounded when combined with the challenges faced by underrepresented populations within the profession. To date, these challenges have been greeted by an ad hoc, piecemeal reaction to stress and trauma,10 which only inhibits wellness in the profession. Part I explores the current literature in both the humanities and the legal profession, beginning with a brief discussion about trauma to explain what it is and its impacts on the legal profession. Part II then takes a didactic look at the legal profession and what makes it so vulnerable to trauma, discussing some of the societal and economic drivers that make trauma so prevalent in the profession, especially amongst minoritized populations. Next, in Part III, this Article discusses the legal profession’s current siloed efforts to understand trauma in the profession and to improve well-being, and its need to better strategize a solution that ensures more effective results. Finally, in Part IV, lies the bedrock of my thesis—that though trauma cannot be avoided in this profession (or anywhere), the best course of conduct is to embrace the new conversations about “human behavio[]r (including biases) and emotions” and how they affect the law.