Under Pressure: Confronting the Mental Health Crisis in Law

Episode Notes

Transcript

Molly Ranns:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the State Bar of Michigan’s On Balance Podcast on Legal Talk Network. I’m Molly Ranns.

JoAnn Hathaway:

And I’m JoAnn Hathaway. We are very pleased to have Rick Barinbaum join us today. Rick is the clinical social worker, educator and practitioner who spent more than a decade at a nonprofit legal organization in New York City before moving to Michigan and pivoting to education and consulting for the last seven years. He currently teaches at the University of Michigan School of Social Work co-teaches the human trafficking lab at the law school and consults across a range of Michigan law clinics to support wellbeing and flourishing in the practice of law. Rick is the sole proprietor of relational advocacy LLC, that aims to leverage the power of relationships to advance shared goals and improve outcomes with a particular focus on flourishing in the legal profession. He does consulting work for the state court administrative office connected to child welfare and legal advocacy and helps facilitate Michigan’s commission on wellbeing in the law. And with that, Rick, could you share some more information about yourself with our listeners, please?

Rick Barinbaum:

Sure. I think I just want to add that I’m somebody’s dad, I’m spouse, I’m somebody’s brother, I’m somebody’s son, someone’s friend. And I say all those things because I think that in our professional roles sometimes we only see people in that way. But I also like everybody who’s listening here, I just carry all these other roles at the same time. And it’s funny in the ways that even talking on this podcast, I’m almost reluctant to say all those things to you.

Molly Ranns:

Yeah. Well, I’m glad you brought them up, Rick, and I’m so glad that you carry a role as helping us to facilitate the commission on wellbeing and the law. I have had the distinct pleasure of working with Rick over the last couple of years, and he has such an amazing wealth of knowledge and I’m just so grateful you’re here with us today. Rick, as you know and as I know as the director for the Lawyers and Judges Assistance Program and as a fellow clinician, that there really is a crisis of wellbeing in the practice of law right now. And I’m hoping you can help us to understand really what is that crisis and what does it mean to support wellbeing in this field?

Rick Barinbaum:

It’s a great question, and I think that there’s the obvious things that we see about a profession around rates of mental illness, of divorce, of alcoholism, but those are just the things that we see. I think that what the crisis is, is that while lawyers, and I’m going to start saying we here, I’m a social worker, but I’ve been working with lawyers for the last, it started to approach two decades, and my prior work was in child welfare. First my role was to help the clients that were involved in child welfare and court involved, and then my role was to support the staff when I was a supervisor and director. And now that work has just extended kind of supporting everyone because I just think that the practice of law, it’s hard, it’s vital, it’s crucial and competence, zealous, diligent representation, advocacy and work, it’s also important.

But there’s a way that lawyers in that training to become, and the practice of being zealous and competent and diligent is that we don’t learn to take care of ourselves in the process. And so it becomes really hard to sustain the energy and the clarity for that competent, diligent and advocacy. And I think I kind of see this in law school and I’m surrounded by really amazing smart, I think caring clinical professors at University of Michigan, and they work so hard, and I think that the students enter law school relatively fit, well-grounded group with this internal sense of, I think self-worth. They made it to a top law school. They’re doing amazing work by the end of law school, really, their internal gratification is all external. It’s all about grades. It’s about who are you in law review, what internships, internships, clerkships are you getting? And so there’s this interesting kind of toll of I think being part of this really important system that’s reflected in all those things I said at the top around mental illness and alcoholism. And so yeah, to me that crisis is that there’s an emotional, physical and strain of the work that kind of sits side by side with that confidence, zealous and diligent practice a law.

JoAnn Hathaway:

As someone who works closely with legal professionals, what are the main tensions or pressures that you see, Rick, that you think make practicing law so uniquely challenging? Is it the long hours, the high stakes that you were just mentioning, or something else entirely?

Rick Barinbaum:

I think about this in a couple of different ways. And so there’s these four tensions that I kind of land on. The first one is by someone named Gail Victor, who is a consumer debt attorney and worked for 25 years before becoming a social worker. And she talked about these two qualities of perfectionism and pessimism, and I extend that a little bit more. I call it perfectionism and catastrophizing, meaning that lawyers and the people who work with lawyers are trained to one, be perfect. And there’s all sorts of cliches for that dot every I cross, every t leave, no stone unturned. So it’s both. We have to be perfect and catastrophizing, gaming out all the scenarios and situations where things could go horribly wrong. And I think just holding those two things there, I have to be perfect and I need to think about all the ways that this can go wrong has a toll on you.

Another tension that I’ve seen in a lot of my work is just that it’s an adversarial system that requires cooperation. And so in some ways the practice of law, it’s built on conflict and in some ways that conflict is good and necessary, but also I think a lot of people throughout their career learn, they lose the ability to have neuroplasticity, meaning that kind of jumping back and forth between, okay, this person is my adversary today, but could be my ally tomorrow. Or even in a basic level like the person who’s across the aisle, you need to rely on them for discovery demands. You need to be able to have sober conversations. And that’s really hard when we’re demonizing our adversaries. Another piece of this that ties in is zealous advocacy, regardless of right or wrong. And I’m a big believer in our legal system and that everyone needs to have robust representation.

And when you’re advocating for somebody and perhaps what they’re doing goes against your own values, it can be morally and emotionally exhausting. And then finally, it’s just that I think this work is so emotionally challenging, whatever it is, whether it’s direct representation, whether you’re a lawyer, whether you’re a judge, it’s emotionally challenging work. I think that overall we’re sort of encouraged to withhold our emotions, or more specifically, I think we’re frowned upon to express a lot of emotion except for anger. It’s fine for you to pound your fists on the table and be upset about X topic, about an injustice, about whatever it is. But if you’re sad or frustrated or you’re worried or you’re disappointed, these are all things that were kind of frowned upon expressing. So I think that these kind of four things, perfectionism and catastrophizing, this adversarial system that requires cooperation, zealous advocacy, regardless of right or wrong, and this emotionally challenging work, while we don’t have a release valve for it, I think it really makes this profession really hard in a unique way.

Molly Ranns:

And I’ve heard you talk about those four things before Rick, and I think there’s so much value in all of those aspects. And a lot of times when we’re talking about that release valve or a way to kind of de-stress from the difficulties of the day, we talk about engaging in wellness, we talk about self-care, and as I am traveling around the state and the country talking about some of these things, I have people say, Molly, I am doing self-care doing the one vacation or the one massage. And I think those are great things. I like vacations and I love massages, but true self-care is really creating a life we don’t have to escape from. So if we’re returning to the day-to-day and we’re right back in that space, that’s really challenging. Why do you think these common approaches to self-care or wellness or wellbeing are falling short in this field?

Rick Barinbaum:

I loved your framing of it, and I do this exercise with students when I’m talking about wellbeing, which is put up a slide with a picture of a, it’s like a person in a suit with a crystal ball in front of them. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s something about, it looks like a lawyer with a crystal ball. And I say, okay, imagine the world you want to create. How many hours are you going to work? How often are you going to see your loved ones? Do you want to have friends or children or a pet? How often are you going to see that pet? And these may sound like small things, but it’s really interesting that so many law students I talked to who have mapped out their entire lives except for how they’re going to take care of themselves, I literally talked to a student who had a 10 year plan.

She was particularly type A, but a 10 year plan broken down by month of where she wanted to go. And part of that was not going to the gym or taking care of herself, but I’m going to back up a little bit. So when I was in New York at the Center for Family Representation, they were really ahead of the game in thinking about trauma and secondary trauma and vicarious trauma. And we all read, I’m right forgetting the name of the book by Nora Vander Lipinski, that was about really thinking about secondary trauma. And so we were thinking about these things and that was a great place to start. But where I’ve landed now is a number of places. And so while I’m all about wellness, I’m all about all about reducing the vicarious and secondary trauma for people that are engaged in public interest work or direct advocacy, criminal justice, child welfare, wherever it is.

I hate all these words. And the reason why I hate them is that when I say wellness, I think of a commercial of a very, very happy content fit person kind of floating on a yoga pillow. And I don’t think they’re calm, they’re controlled. Where I think real wellness is really messy. It’s like working out. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable. It’s full of stumbles and includes some injuries that you have to mend. When my spouse had her first kid, she was doing this workout with somebody who was a mom who also gave birth, and that person talked about winning ugly. And that always stayed with me. And I think that wellness sometimes is like, it’s not pretty. There can be an ugliness to it in a good way. I don’t love the word self-care because it implies isolation. Like this is the thing that I do on my own when in reality the sort of resilience and healing requires connection with other people.

Meditating is a really great practice. You do it alone, but if you really want to get a good practice, you have an accountability buddy where you both talk about the times that you meditate and then you talk about how it’s going. And so there’s so many ways that I think you can go on a run and you do it on your own, but there’s a lot of this, regardless of whether you’re a social creature or not, that connecting with other people is important. And then finally I think about sort secondary trauma and vicarious trauma. And there’s a flaw there. And it’s not to critique people that think in this lens, but the premise of that is, I’m fine. I’m a lawyer, a social worker working with lawyers, I’m a judge and I’m fine. And my clients, they’re not fine and they’ve had trauma, and I have to be really, really careful because if I’m not careful, their not fineness is going to rub off on me and then I’m not going to be fine.

And I think the pivot is kind of in two ways. One is we are all not fine and we’re all fine. We’re all humans. We have things that are good, we have things that are bad, things that are challenging. And so rather than I’m fine and that if I’m not careful, my clients who are angry or frustrated or sad or have had hard things, that’s going to rub off me. I think we have to start with ourselves. Another sort of way that I would articulate it is, and I’m quoting a dear friend and colleague of mine, the Vic Sanin at the law school, is that what we’re really talking about is PPE, like personal protective equipment during COVID. That’s what everyone learned, that phrase. It’s like you see if someone’s going to go into surgery, they’re going to put on a mask, they’re going to put on gloves.

They’re probably like a whole get up. But as lawyers, what’s your PPE? You’re working regardless of what type of law you practice, it’s hard. It’s grueling. The hours are intense. And for all the things we’ve already named, there’s a lot there. And so what are the ways that we protect ourselves first before going in? And so I haven’t found the right word for it. I’m so open to ideas of what the right word for it. I think that maybe flourishing is at least for today where I’m landing, but those are my critiques of wellness and even vicarious and secondary trauma.

Molly Ranns:

I think that’s all so accurate, Rick. And I think there’s also this idea of resiliency in trauma, watching other people who have had such traumatic experiences be successful in the criminal justice system. And I think there’s a resiliency that’s a shared connection that we are allowed to witness and experience while we’re doing that work as well. So there’s so much more to say about this, but we are going to take a short break from our conversation with Rick Berenbaum to thank our sponsors.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Welcome back. We are thrilled to be here today with Rick Berenbaum, clinical social worker, educator and practitioner. Rick specializes in lawyer wellbeing and specifically helping folks flourish within the practice of law. So Rick, let’s talk about compassion. How does cultivating compassion changed the way lawyers see themselves, their colleagues, and even their clients? And why is this important in a field that’s often seen as adversarial as you had mentioned?

Rick Barinbaum:

I think that in some ways compassion is a structure that makes your personal protective equipment in a hard and challenging world. And so I’ve been really fortunate in the last two years to connect with people thinking about compassion. And so I think that compassion is, it’s recognizing suffering and a desire to alleviate it, and it’s applied inward and it’s outwards. A colleague of mine always named this article by Frank Bruney, who’s a New York Times columnist, and he had a stroke behind one of his eyes. And after that happened, it was like best case scenario, you’re going to be a little blurry in one eye, worst case scenario, you’re going to go blind. So really scary stuff. But after that happened, all these people came up to him who he thought had it together, had it figured out. And as those people were coming to him, they would say, I had a cancer scare last year.

I’m grappling with this thing with my kid. I suddenly have this new ailment. And it just completely opened his eyes, not in a depressing way, like, oh, the world is awful, but in this way where it’s like, wow, we are all individually struggling. So I think that compassion is a way to have more ease in the world. And I think that people don’t engage or listen better when we are. They are angry, disappointed or scared. They can hear what you have to say when they feel seen. Now, when I talk about this stuff to a group of lawyers, there’s always a bit of work that I do around fostering connections. This really does sound like, oh, Rick’s just talking about being nice. This is so much more than that. It’s recognizing that you are indeed suffering. You’re not actually the superman or person that you think you are while you amazing and can do so much.

And so it’s recognizing who you are and that you’re suffering seeing that they’re suffering all around you. I can give an example of this. There’s a judge, he’s not on the bench anymore, his name is Tim Connors. But I saw him cut off visits, all visits between a parent and their child, and he did so in the most humane way where he fully acknowledged them as human beings. He fully acknowledged that it’s hard. He fully acknowledged that they think that this is unfair. His body language, his posture showed that he was deeply caring about it. And when I think about, while haven’t talked to this parent after they left, my guess is they’re pretty mad, but they’re mad at what happened. They weren’t mad at him. And that’s important. And I think so many times in our system, we end up putting anger, frustration at a person rather than the larger picture.

I think about how compassion shows up in, on the one hand, in criminal justice, I think about this with juvenile justice with kids. I think about this with adults. I think about in child welfare that hurt people, hurt people, people that have had something hard happen in their lives. And you can still hold those people accountable, like recognizing their suffering, being caring. You can also hold them accountable though. And I think that when I gave that example of Tim Connors, he was holding them accountable. He cut off all that contact, but he did so in a good way. And my guess is he was also taking care of himself in a lot of ways to be able to show up as that person. Yeah, I think that compassion is about seeing suffering, wanting to alleviate it, acknowledging it, thinking inward, thinking outward.

Molly Ranns:

Rick, I want to stay with compassion for just a minute. I do a lot of presenting on compassion fatigue. And I think there’s this misconception that compassion fatigue is being too compassionate. And I think folks that enter the field of law, clinicians like ourselves, we are compassionate individuals. That’s why we’re in the field that we’re in. And I don’t think being too compassionate is a problem that’s being authentically ourselves. I think compassion fatigue is when we are being compassionate toward others, but we don’t have any compassion for ourselves. It’s not flowing both ways. And I sometimes see that really, as you had mentioned, students go into school and they are intact individuals. And a lot of times the research that shows that law students have such high rates of mental health and substance use issues, the overwhelming majority of these students tell us that going into one L, these issues didn’t exist. So we know something is happening in law school, and one of the things I see happen is really that self-compassion leave where it just becomes compassion for others. And so I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit self-compassion. What does it look like in legal practice and what tools are needed to support it?

Rick Barinbaum:

It’s a great question, and I want to expand. I see some of these issues starting with law school, but to be totally clear, I’m talking about the full candidate of everybody in the legal system. And another thing I just wanted to name is that when I, and this is going to pivot to self-compassion, but when I talk about this idea of compassion with clients, I also think you can extend that compassion to your adversaries. I think you can extend that compassion to a judge. And so many times people don’t think about the judges as being, oh, well, they have it all together. They have the most power, whereas they’re suffering too. And so I think that there’s something to recognizing that suffering. You said something that I really latch onto, which is this idea of compassion fatigue. I’m not critiquing you. I think this is a challenge around language.

I don’t know if compassion fatigue is what we’re really talking about. It could be around empathetic distress. And if you look at a brain scan, I’m not a neuroscientist, but I have one slide that I really love, which shows that the same place where we experience pain is the same place where we experience empathy. And so if you are really caring about people that you can almost care too much. I also think that sometimes it’s about the structures that we operate in, the pressures how much time there is in the day, but going to your actual question, how do we do this? What does it look like in practice? I think that it’s about noticing and naming for yourself. One of the quickest roads to noticing and naming is meditation. Now, I’m not like a guru about meditation. I probably meditate somewhere between five minutes and 10 minutes a day.

Sometimes I try to spread it out. But this kind of idea of self-regulation and knowing when you’re getting dysregulated, feeling it in your body and then saying, okay, there’s something going on here. I need to give myself a break. So this kind of noticing and naming yourself not only what’s happening physically, but also emotionally, but also seeing it around you. And when one of your colleagues or adversaries is coming in hot, our instant responses, well, they’re being a horrible person, being a jerk again versus like, Ooh, there’s some suffering going on there. And it just feels different. You don’t have to operate any differently when it’s time to fight. We can still fight. So I think another part is accepting that your struggle is not a sign of failure. If anything struggling I think is a sign of success, of working really, really hard. I think it’s understanding the discrepancy between how people perceive of us and the complex reality of what we carry internally, how that plays out.

And just recognizing that people see you as a lawyer, people see you as a judge, but actually you carry so much more. And so many of us, not only are we taking care of kids, but our relatives that are getting older, our parents that are getting older in age, this sandwich generation, our own struggles with anxiety or depression or whatever the thing is that could have started well before entering law school. So I think it’s just about seeing that discrepancy and knowing, oh, these people don’t see my full humanity right now and I’m not seeing theirs. I think it’s creating a foundation for sustainability. It’s thinking about these self-regulation practices, mindfulness, grounding, building a network of people who kind of get it that you can lean on. And it’s funny how your relationships can change over time, and you can have a period of time that one person who’s your best friend in the world is a terrible person to talk about work with because they’ll ask you these questions and you get annoying.

And then sometimes that person pivots to being the right person. So it’s about figuring out who are the people who get it. You can be honest with sometimes it’s your colleagues, sometimes it’s your loved ones, sometimes it’s someone else. And I think that what I’m really talking about are holistic habits that are small, repeatable acts that kind of align with your broader vision that keep you connected. And these are micro breaks. This is when you’re taking two minutes to reregulate. When I was seeing clients back to back, I saw this phenomenon that if somebody was angry and I had talked to them doing an initial client interview along with a lawyer, I would walk away angry. If they were sad, I’d walk away sad. If they were a little psychotic, I’d walk away feeling a little bit psychotic. So I would just go to the bathroom and wash my hands depending on how I was feeling, warm water or cold water.

And it just did this thing where it was a little ritual that helped me have a space to breathe and go back. I couldn’t meditate Courtroom while everyone was looking at me. I probably could have, but I would’ve felt weird. But I could go to the bathroom and just take a minute and wash my hands just kind of gently. Sometimes I would even splash water in my face if I needed to. So I’m just using this as a small example, but this is about a way of being in the world about noticing, about engaging in practices of recognizing the full humanity around you. And another piece of it is that, just to underscore the point, that being angry, while it can be energizing a bit, ultimately it just has a really hard toll on all of us. And this idea that we can still hold people accountable, still fight, but do it without that pit of rage. It really can open the door to a lot of great things while doing great work.

JoAnn Hathaway:

Rick, we understand that you’ve been involved in leading compassion retreats for legal professionals. Can you walk us through what a typical retreat looks like and what are the main activities and what are you actually hoping that the participants take away from the experience?

Rick Barinbaum:

So I’ve been so fortunate. I have two colleagues that are dear friends, Bridget Carr, who’s at the law school and Sanin. We’ve been able to facilitate some compassion retreats with judges. We’re about to do one day, but really I think that two and a half days is so far been the magic number. But we’re going to do a one day that has lawyers and practitioners. Molly, you see me sometimes do some mini elements, the Compassion retreats at the Commission on wellbeing and the law. These retreats, they offer a space for attorneys to reflect, reconnect, and build that emotional PPE that I’ve been referencing. And so that’s exploring self-compassion, exploring empathy. We situated in neuroscience and psychology and some really contemplative practices, and some of those practices include storytelling, the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we tell about others. We do reflection.

We have discussions about our inner critics and really creating these kind of small tools. And so the goal is to combat burnout, reduce isolation, and kind of recenter in a sustainable way that’s connected to your legal identity and also embracing who you are. And looking back on the first time we did this, the relationships and connections out of the participants that they made. And these were all very different people who I don’t know if they would’ve connected with each other outside of this. And they were just such a tight group. And so not only was it all the things that I mentioned, but just this kind of this relationship. And so we see this as a way of not only helping you in your work, it helps you hold onto your humanity, the humanity of your clients, the humanity of your colleagues and your adversaries.

And I think that our hope is we’d love to expand this work. We’ve done some work that was sponsored by our state court administrative of office. We’d love to partner with a law firm who’s looking to bring these kind of ideas in. I think I’ve done a lot of the professional clinical term is I’ve done a lot of cool stuff I think in my, but right now, this compassion work is probably the thing that I’m most proud of. And it just really is the confluence of all these different kind of pieces of this challenging work that I see can create real dividends for people in the practice of law.

Molly Ranns:

And I would just say I have been able to see Rick do some of this work up close and personal with the Commission on Wellbeing and the law, and it’s been such a pleasure to witness, and I am so excited. I’m hoping to partner with him and have LA Lawyers and Judges Assistance program be able to help facilitate some of this compassion work with retreats for lawyers around the state so that they can have this benefit through their membership. And so I’m really excited about where this can go and there’s so much value in it. And I talked to a lot of people who are on the commission who have been on other commissions or have done other work and have said, work on this commission just feels differently. And I think this is a huge piece of that is this compassion work that Rick talks about.

Rick Barinbaum:

I appreciate you so much, Molly. What you said, and something I’ve told you is I love to get positive feedback. There’s always a small part of me that feels so uncomfortable getting it because I’m part of this profession where perfectionism and catastrophizing it. I’ve embraced that too. But one other thing I want to just underscore when I talk about these compassion retreats, it’s really great when I’m next to Vive and Bridget, all three of us are different human beings. Well, Molly, you and I have spent that have been, I think breathing the practice of law for a long time, but it’s also really great having these law professors with me and we all kind of facilitate different types of activities. We each bring different things. We kind of riff off of each other in the same way that we’re talking, and it’s a real treat to be able to do it

JoAnn Hathaway:

Well. That truly sounds like a wonderful experience. And with that, it does look like we’ve come to the end of our show. We’d like to thank our guest today, Rick Berenbaum, for a wonderful program.

Molly Ranns:

Rick, if folks want to follow up with you and I imagine that they will, whether it’s just to learn more or to find out how they can engage in a compassion retreat or just to learn more about what you do, what is the best way to reach you?

Rick Barinbaum:

Really, the best way right now is email. And if you just Google me and put you ish, my bio will come up. Especially I think if you put up the School of social work, that’s where I know that I, I’m listed. But yeah, the best way to find me.

Molly Ranns:

Thank you again, Rick. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Rick Barinbaum:

No problem. It’s my pleasure.

Molly Ranns:

This has been another edition of the State Bar of Michigan On Balance Podcast. I’m JoAnn Hathaway. And I’m Molly Rands. Until next time, thank you for listening.

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