Colorado Supreme Court
Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel
Promoting Professionalism. Protecting the Public.
Event opens dialogue about lawyer suicide
The profession’s leaders met last
month to address an issue that affects so many yet is spoken about so little.
As one attendee put it, “We just need to start talking about it.”
By JAMES CARLSON
Winter 2016
Denver
attorney Carlos Migoya stood before a group of judges
and lawyers last month and talked about a problem affecting so many but spoken
of so little.
“Suicide.
Depression.” he said. “We just need to start saying the words.”
Speaking at
a leadership roundtable on the issue, Migoya recalled
one of his close lawyer friends who committed suicide. Sitting nearby, Colorado
Supreme Court Chief Justice Nancy Rice nodded. She knew colleagues who committed
suicide. So did Clerk of the Supreme Court Chris Ryan, who attended and spoke
about his brother taking his own life. Tom Adgate,
another Colorado attorney, told his personal struggle with severe depression
and suicidal thoughts. Very powerful.
Everyone who
spoke agreed: We need to talk more openly about this.
The
roundtable — “Confronting the Issue: The Unacceptable Rate of Suicide in Our
Profession” — was co-hosted by the Colorado Lawyer Assistance Program (COLAP),
Colorado Lawyers Helping Lawyers (CLHL), and the Carson J. Spencer Foundation.
The state’s leading lawyers and judges attended, including Chief Justice Rice
and former Chief Justice Michael Bender. The crowd heard personal stories of
loss and heard about the big picture statistics.
And the
statistics are sobering. In the Colorado population as a whole, suicide is a
silent problem. In 2014, 1,058 Coloradoans died by suicide, the highest number
ever recorded and more than double the number who died in car crashes that
year.
Attorneys
are particularly vulnerable. Recently, Barbara Ezyk, Executive Director of COLAP,
conducted an informal survey of lawyer assistance programs. Nineteen states
responded for a total of 42 known judge/lawyer suicides in a six-month period. (Colorado
had two known suicides during that same time frame.) That averages out to seven
judges/ lawyers committing suicide each month. And the American Bar Association and the
Betty Ford Foundation released a research study this month showing that nearly one in three
attorneys struggle with some form of depression.
Attendants
at the roundtable in January said the legal culture prevents people from even
acknowledging the problem. Lawyers have gone through so much to get to where
they are. They studied hard to get into law school, worked their butt off to
earn their J.D., poured themselves into bar exam preparation and then joined a
field where they feel they have to be someone else’s rock, the go-to person who
is always resilient.
“How do you
then get these people to admit they’re struggling?” Migoya
asked during one of the small-group discussions.
Sally
Spencer-Thomas, the CEO of the Carson J. Spencer Foundation, pointed to the
shifting perception of cancer as a model for the future of suicide prevention.
She recalled how her father’s generation saw cancer as a weakness and that when
he finally admitted to her that he had prostate cancer, he whispered it so
softly she could barely hear it.
“Now we talk
about it, and we kick cancer’s butt,” she said. “We need to start talking about
suicide.”
Because
we’re now so open about cancer, we tend to catch it earlier. Not so with
suicides. Spencer-Thomas said we tend to treat suicide at the acute level, only
when someone is on the edge. We need to reach people earlier before they even
consider it. “It’s like if we only treated cancer at stage IV,” she said.
The U.S. Air
Force is a perfect case study. Officials noted that suicides in their ranks had
increased significantly from 1990 to 1994 when the rate peaked at 16.4 per
100,000. The Air Force launched a program that emphasized leadership
involvement and a community approach to prevention. It worked to identify those
at risk early and guide them toward treatment. Between 1996 and 2002, the rate
of suicide among Air Force personnel dropped 33 percent.
At the
roundtable last month, those gathered broke into small groups to discuss how to
address the issue in the lawyer population. Many said the first and biggest
step was simply to raise awareness. Some of the ideas discussed were to:
· Continue the discussion back at the
lawyers’ organizations, firms and offices; and
· Change the culture of the profession
to create a culture of wellness that encourages people to ask for help; and
· Make continuing legal education on
mental health and substance abuse mandatory; and
· Make lawyers more aware of resources
such as the Colorado Lawyer Assistance Program and Colorado Lawyers Helping
Lawyers
The high
rate of depression and suicide in the legal profession is unacceptable; let’s
keep the discussion on going, out and in the open.
If you or
someone you know is in need of confidential assistance or support, please reach
out to the Colorado Lawyer Assistance Program today.
James Carlson is the
Information Resources Coordinator with the Office of Attorney Regulation
Counsel.