Page 118 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
maintain this willingness to exercise more flexibility, perhaps we might make it easier for women to succeed in this profession, lower divorce rates among attorneys, and remove at least some of the barriers in the professional world that so often set people with disabilities up for failure.
Professional flexibility, however, is only one of the things that made a difference for me while caring for aging parents during the pandemic. I have come to understand how a family crisis or health emergency could push some lawyers to the breaking point, but I also have learned that it doesn’t have to be that way.
The legal community is slowly beginning to respond to the need to support lawyers’ mental health. To date, however, most programs have focused on the need for substance abuse help. I wholeheartedly support those programs; substance abuse statistics within the profession compelled us to tackle that mental health issue first. But perhaps it is time to recognize that substance abuse help is only the first step, and that we should also be addressing our stress in other ways that might help preventing substance abuse.
Not all lawyers have ready access to the kind of support that I had in June and July—but we would improve the practice of law if they did. Lawyers lives would be improved immeasurably if large law firms and/or local bar organizations had licensed social workers like April on staff. Qualified, objective professionals who could provide mental health education, crisis intervention, sentinel event management, referrals to other services that a lawyer or family member might need, and other general support. All of us have seasons of our lives when we spend time dealing with personal or professional emergencies, but let’s face it—we often are better at solving client problems than our own. Many problems could be addressed more quickly and more successfully if a qualified professional was available to help achieve the goal. Productivity and focus would increase, as would overall employee wellness, with this kind of assistance readily available.
The last twelve months tested the legal community in unprecedented ways, but it may also have revealed solutions to the weaknesses that we have previously refused to acknowledge. We owe it to ourselves to use the difficulties we faced in 2020 to find a better path forward for ourselves and our colleagues.
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