“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
~ Mark Twain
I was speaking to a mom of three children the other day. She drives them to their different schools every morning and ferries them to sports activities after school and on the weekends, while trying to advance her career in the remaining time. She was talking about how difficult it was to stay on top of everything and take care of her own health, but she was pleased that she was somehow managing it all. My response? “Sure, right up to the breakdown.”
I reacted that way because it sounded too familiar to what I experienced practicing law. I also did it all (parenting my children, taking care of clients, administrative tasks, business promotion, commuting), right up to the breakdown. And then I did it again, right up to the next breakdown. Luckily for me I never hit the bottom and kept digging, as many others do.
My mental and physical health just took a hit, I wallowed for a while, and then I got it together and carried on carrying on. I did not develop an addiction or end up in the hospital. But was I happy? Not particularly.
I met many lawyers who on the surface seemed to be doing great, right up to the stint in the hospital or rehab, the extended leave of absence for personal reasons, or the sudden departure from private practice for a perceived easier job in-house, or in government, or academia. It is human nature to carry on as if everything is fine, as we get swept along the river of denial.
There is that awful story about a lawyer and mother in the U.K. who closed a huge transaction and then apparently committed suicide. Her firm said that they had checked in on her and that she had said that everything was fine. Presumably denying that there was a problem was expected, and any other reaction would have been expected to generate more stress.
Someone once told me that people lie when they fear the reaction to them telling the truth, and that if you want people to be honest with you, you must remove that fear from the equation.
And so, my question for professional firm management is whether they create a culture where people feel safe telling them how they are really doing, or whether they promote a culture that encourages people to stay quiet and suffer, right up to the breakdown.
And for the committed capitalists for whom the bottom line dictates all policy, I ask whether it is more cost effective to support the mental and physical health of their people, or to treat them as fungible and substitute a new human for the one who has broken down. Looking at how they carry on, I can only guess that they have done the calculation, and that it is cheaper to replace people when they crash and burn than to help them avoid becoming unwell, or support them when they do.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.