Law schools are expanding mental health and wellness support.
Law school can be emotionally taxing and take a serious toll on one’s mental health. Students who are prepared for the added stress can perform better in school and in turn be better positioned to embark on a legal career.
Luckily, law schools are now doing more to help students manage the stress of legal education.
David Jaffe, associate dean for student affairs at American University’s Washington College of Law, is one of the authors of a report titled “It Is Okay to Not Be Okay: The 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being.” Overall, he said, today’s students are arriving at law school with much more self-awareness than earlier generations.
Although some stigma remains about reaching out when in need of assistance, students are seeing their classmates be more open about seeking help, and they are replicating this positive behavior, Jaffe said.
A recent study by The NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education found that while a majority of 2019 law school graduates are doing well on the employment front, 39% of all grads and 44% of females said the pandemic is continuing to have a negative effect on their mental health and well-being. In 2018, the percentage of law graduates citing such issues was 31%.
Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law and Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota both recently launched wellness centers for students. The schools saw a rising need to help students manage stress and mental health and took steps to address the issue.
Karen Bravo, dean at IU McKinney Law, said resources previously available at the school were inadequate to meet the growing need. The university at large had a couple of wellness centers for students, but they were flooded with requests and were unable to fulfill the needs of the law students. Bravo discussed the situation with the university’s dean of social work, and they put together a plan to add a new wellness center specifically for the law school.
“Our goal here is to have an early intervention point,” Bravo said. “Law school is very anxiety producing. We all remember our first year of law school particularly, and with the general anxiety post-pandemic and its impacts, we want it to be proactive on behalf of our students.”
Lynn LeMoine, dean of students at Mitchell Hamline, said investing in students’ professional and personal well-being has been part of the school’s strategic plan for several years.
“From the dean of students office to the board of trustees, it is a part of who we are as a law school,” she said. “I think we are really unique in that. The faculty and administration are really invested in supporting law student well-being, and that allows us to be more creative with the kinds of things that we try here, because there’s just such universal support for this.”
LeMoine has been dean of students since 2016 and has seen the school’s resources grow from a single contracted mental health counselor available 10 hours per week to five contracted counselors with 40 hours of available time. She has worked with other faculty to embed well-being into the school’s curriculum.
Natalie Netzel, an associate professor of law and director of Mitchell Hamline’s Clinical Education Program, said a lot of situations in the legal world intersect with well-being, or the lack thereof.
“We do work in some of our classes to teach letting go of perfectionism,” she said. “We talk about trauma, and how trauma shows up in law for clients, and how lawyers can be vicariously traumatized.”
Netzel said the law school’s wellness center is an outgrowth of the idea that there should be wellness resources on campus so students do not need to go off campus. Self-care can only exist if the institution values the need for self-care and creates an environment in which it can thrive.
American University’s Jaffe agreed that much progress has been made in the past decade. He noted that in the past, educators were discouraged from discussing stress and wellness at orientation for fear that entering students might think law school was a breeding ground for mental health issues.
“Now, an entering student at most law schools should anticipate several touches on stress and anxiety and how to address these feelings when they arise,” he said, “both at the start of the semester and reinforced throughout the year through reminders about access to counseling, and through positive reinforcement via wellness programming, and reminders that the students earned the right to be where they are, and that [they] are fully capable of the work before them.”
Michelle Moore, assistant clinical professor of field instruction and coordination at Indiana University’s School of Social Work, oversaw IU McKinney Law’s wellness center project. She said it is designed to provide services on multiple levels.
For starters, there is free, confidential, one-on-one wellness coaching available to students. There’s also a group room with coffee and snacks where students can come in to simply take a load off and destress from their day.
In addition, the center offers group activities to get students involved and talking with each other, which Moore said is one of the best ways to start the mental health and wellness journey.
“We’re trying to surround the students in different ways with things that they could take away that they’ll look at as building their toolbox,” Moore said. “When they get out and they’re graduated, they have all these different tools that they can pull from, not just one or two.”
Jaffe noted that most students struggle with stress to some degree, and the challenge for them is to recognize that they need help.
“Students can help themselves by not waiting to get started on these issues,” he said. “Working through personal matters takes time, and time is an element students often feel they do not have enough of once enrolled in law school.
“Find a good counselor, at least start to do the work, and allow yourself to be in much better mental shape when your focus and concentration will be most needed.”
Check out the article in the magazine for more, including five ways to care for your mental health.
