Tortured Lawyers

Like so many of you, I gave Taylor Swift’s new album a spin. However, I got stuck on the name. While there has been much written and romanticized about tortured artists, including tortured poets, I got to think about the struggles facing tortured lawyers, and how often times the tortured lawyers make far less noise about the challenges they are facing.

We talk a lot about the mental health challenges facing the profession. Fortunately, others are starting to talk about this issue too. However, too few lawyers are actually getting the help they need, instead struggling on in silence, or self-medicating with drugs or alcohol. Or worse, dying from suicide in silence, their bid to escape the darkness of their torture.

Because mental health challenges absolutely can be torture. Living a life where your own mind is against you, whispering dark lies, isolating you from the very support networks that could help you, can be torturous. Especially when your mind traps you in negative thought patterns that drag you through these challenges over and over again.

When I talk to people about suicide, many often phrase it as people wanting to die. In my experience, suicide is more often people who want to live, just not like that, not in the darkness created by their own demons. It isn’t a sign of weakness, or a cowards way out. It is the worst symptom of a torturous disease.

I say this as someone who has felt the passive tugs of suicide, the feeling that the pain won’t stop, that I was too much of a burden to the people in my life. I understand the tortured silence so many lawyers live with because I’ve lived it myself. It is why I created the LegalMind Society. It is why I try to remind others struggling with mental health challenges that they are not alone.

Because Taylor Swift and the tortured poets have the right idea. We need to talk about it, even sing about it, if we are going to start pushing those torturous demons back into the shadows.