John Y’s Musings from the Middle: Why Lawyers Shouldn’t Commit Suicide

What we do is only what we do. Not who we are. (Or why lawyers shouldn’t commit suicide)

As my teen kids get older I encourage them to find “their people”–the groups where they feel they belong and are most at home with. Their tribe, so …to speak. For me, one of the first such groups I found this kinship with was lawyers. I’m one myself, though non-practicing. I found that my interests, ways of thinking, sense of humor, social concerns and life aspirations lined up well with other lawyers–more so than say engineers, accountants, or medical professionals.

Lawyers are a quirky bunch.  I joked the other day that one appeal of the profession is that it allows an individual to take his or her collective character defects and bill for them. It’s an exacting, hyper-competitive and idealized profession where each day you start off feeling like Perry Mason but finish the day feeling more like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. And so it’s not a shock that attorney’s, as a group, suffer a notably higher than average rate of depression, addiction and suicide. It’s a profession that is both analytical and philosophical. Lawyers are trained to think more and feel less. And many eventually find themselves, on their bad days, on an intellectual precipice staring down, as Nietzsche observed, at the abyss. And the abyss can seem both all consuming and mocking. And since lawyers are not encouraged to ask for help themselves –since they aspire for the controlled hero role in their jobs– they are left alone to do as they are trained to do: To “think their way” out of a problem that was created, ironically, by over-thinking.

My mother tells me my favorite book as a young child was What People Do All Day by Richard Scarry. In the book it explains how everyone has a job to do during the day. Some are bakers, some are firemen, some our merchants, some are farmers, some are moms, some are repairmen, some are are doctors and some are lawyers. And so on. And each has some task or assignment for the day that makes everything kind of work together.

The reason I started this post was to link to this story —an eloquent reflection on on the legal profession by one of Kentucky’s wisest and most insightful practitioners, Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham, who recently lost yet another friend and colleague to suicide. Click here to read the story.

But I think I’d rather end this post on a more mundane note. Or rather a mundane hope. That lawyers, like the characters in Richard Scarry’s “What People Do All Day” realize they are only doing a job, completing a task, fulfilling a role that makes society somehow work. If it wasn’t being a lawyer they’d be doing some other job that makes society function. And that it’s just a job, like any other.  And that they are just people too. Mostly just trying to stay busy all day.

And others in our busy little towns have jobs that can help those struggling with depression, addiction and thoughts of suicide. And that these people need to stay busy too–from people who need them and reach out for their help. Or our busy little towns won’t work so well.