August 13, 2015
I was at a fundraising event downtown—accountants, doctors, entrepreneurs and engineers mingled about, cocktails in hand. A young, smug-faced finance guy with expensive shoes came up to me, shook my hand and asked what I did for a living. "Lawyer."
A smirk began to curl on his lips and he said: "Hey, what do you throw to a drowning lawyer? His partners." Little did he know that earlier that day, I had spent an hour of unbillable time researching effective suicide methods on lostallhope.com. Accounting for lethality, time and agony, "drowning", whether in an ocean/lake, bathtub or swimming pool, ranked 18th, 23rd, and 24th respectively.
"Shotgun to the head" ranked first, though best use slugs, not buckshot; if buckshot is all you've got, use .24 to .36 calibre, not skeet-grade .05 pellet. Sadly, I'm not joking about any of this. So I'd had a rough day. I'd also heard the joke before, but this was a networking function, so I had to be on.
Without missing a beat, I said, "Y'know what the problem with lawyer jokes is? Lawyers don't think they're funny, but no else thinks they're jokes." He laughed, enjoying the repartee. I drank a lot that night, hating myself for being a lawyer and hating myself for hating myself for being a lawyer.
Surely, among the lawyer set, all ambitious and cocksure, I'm alone in my melancholy, I figured. I must be licking invisible psychic wounds. Besides, no one would have sympathy for my privileged-wealthy-white-guy whimpers. Indeed, we lawyers should be a happy lot. We're paid well, many of us earning six figures within the first few years of practice.
We've got smarts; research suggests our average IQ is a not-too-shabby 120, for whatever that's worth. We're lucky in that our skill set can easily align with our social values too, whether that means serving big business or helping refugees. And while everyone has a lawyer joke up their sleeve, parents are generally proud to say their kid is a lawyer. We should be winners in the pursuit of happiness. But we're not. Far from it. Reams of data prove it. "They are at much greater risk than the general population for depression" summarizes Dr. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and leading researcher in the science of happiness.
A key study supporting Seligman's sad verdict is John Hopkins University research showing that lawyers have the highest rate of depression among all occupations, suffering from depression at a rate of 3.6 times higher than non-lawyers.
Read more at: http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/an-inside-look-at-the-depressed-substance-abusing-world-of-law
Related article: Annual NIDA Survey Shows Declines in Teen Drug Use
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