>It’s our natural state before we accepted the idea that our role in life is to work as much as possible to buy things we don’t need.

#partnerpenn #midtierprestige “Wait a moment. That’s not our role in life? It is for our associates.”

I work 3 days a week (10 hours each) but am time recording/working a full time week. I work due to childcare and so i can see my kids grow up before they go to school. However, working longer and longer weeks on a part time salary. When I’ve flagged this, I just get a shrug and mmhmm as the full time management team are working round the clock.

I don’t see how pp lawyers can have young families and keep up with their colleagues who do not. Yes, kids are a life choice, but I didn’t go into the law on the understanding it was career or a family. I very much believed you could have both. Haha. Looool.

I’ve had times where work demands have battered my mental health. Stress impacts sleep therefore you’re slower and work longer to compensate and that’s how I unravel. It’s like a rope that’s getting thinner and thinner, slowly thread/twine peeling away until SNAP and you’re mentally ill and have to pull yourself back again.

I don’t believe mental health issues are restricted to law and within the next 10 years, IMO more qnd more jobs will be unfilled as more youngsters decide not to sell their soul.

Not really, though.

Sure, some jobs have an element of risk, but H&S legislation is still there & reasonably practicable measures are put in place. I believe there is a blindspot when it comes to MH.

Risk in terms of mental health isn’t disclosed, monitored and talked about as much as physical health. Law firms wouldn’t say “well some jobs are physically risky and their pay reflects that. This job carries a risk of mental ill health and our salary reflects that.” Firms go on about their culture, and how MH is taken seriously. I don’t see the ‘so far as reasonably practicable’ measures put in place to mitigate against poor MH caused by work.

Jesus. Imagine actually wanting to be hit by a car because life in chambers is so horrific.

I wouldn’t take that £100,000 tax pupillage even if they offered it all in cash to my house.

No one is stopping any trainee or future pupil barrister from writing a blog under their real name, posting on Twitter or including their mental health in their written applications.

The problem comes from hypocrites at firms and within chambers who feel they have a ‘right’ not to be confronted with the reality of what the profession does to people.

These sociopaths are the ones who use mental health as an excuse to oust others, claiming their mental health problems of these colleagues make them a ‘danger’ to clients or means they ‘can’t cope with pressure’.

See it for what it is – something some lawyers could potentially use to get rid of the competition around them.

To Anon at 11.17am:

Hunter gatherers worked 15-20 hours a week.
Lawyers at large firms work 60+ hours a week.

Thank you for flagging how the Industrial Revolution changed this.

What is making you so angry?

WTF are you on about. When was this golden period “before we accepted that our role in life is to work”?

Between our hunter gatherer stage and the industrial revolution, the vast majority of regular people were essentially uneducated peasants. Then the industrial revolution came and people (children included) were doing 15 hour days in factories. Now most people work an 8 hour day in an office.

“There will always be people who are prepared to sacrifice money for health. I don’t think we can regulate to solve this.”

Yes we can. It’s same reason we have standards and watchdogs around things like advertising, betting and tobacco – humans can be easily pressured or influenced into acting against their own best interests.

Whilst we may like to believe we have free will and conscious choice, it’s a myth that disintegrates upon interrogation.

Alan, your comment alone suggests you’re unfamiliar with what true good mental health looks like. It’s our natural state before we accepted the idea that our role in life is to work as much as possible to buy things we don’t need. It may be that you’ve never experienced it, except in fleeting moments on holiday or at weekends.

Paradoxically, persisting with your view is what leads to a decline in growth. You need only look at the consistent data on declining mental health outcomes and low productivity.

But then data shouldn’t really be needed as it’s not rocket science – humans aren’t machines.

But people who do physically risky jobs are paid more because of that risk. So your central premise is wrong, rendering everything afterwards irrelevant.

I completely agree that more work can be done to promote mental health awareness and wellbeing in the profession, but I do have some sympathy with the sentiment if not the delivery of the original comment. If wellbeing was not prioritised by previous generations then perhaps toughness is an under-appreciated quality among my age group.

We seem to distinguish between physical & mental health. Off with covid? Broke a bone playing football? Ok.

“In this job, you get paid £150k to climb down chimneys. Every year we lose a few clumsy oafs but they knew the risks when they signed up. Do they want £150k or a safe working environment”?

I think we’d all agree that the above is unacceptable. Yet, when it comes to safeguarding mental, rather than physical, health, a lot of people seem to think it’s fine to tolerate a culture where it is survival of the (mentally) fittest, literally.

That’s before we even open the next chapter on the link between mental ill health and physical health.

Certain practice areas also attract these type of individuals so the two are intertwined. Think PE and lev fin as examples

Your soul is beige, and your tongue is made of corduroy. ‘Reader’s Digest’ is engraved upon your cerebellum.

Typical entitled millennial response. Look at me, I’m going on sick leave because someone used the wrong pronoun when passing me my organic kombucha in Whole Foods. This country is going to the dogs I swear.

This! Absolutely this!

Very similar experience on my end where one transactional team (at the time the crown jewel in the firm’s roster of teams in terms of making money and trainees wanting a seat there) just had the most awful people. Every single trainee to go through that team was disillusioned, and genuinely messed up afterwards because of just how gruesome it was to work for those specific people.

Contrast with the transactional team I qualified into. Yeah, some nights are late and that’s can be grim from the perspective of lost sleep hours, but the team is so well managed and non toxic that it’s not really ever a source of frustration to do a couple of Kate nights in a row, and just part of the job on occasion.

Lots of people told me at qualification to not pick a team based on people but on the work because people move. while this is generally true, never settle for a team so toxic that your mental health takes a dip just seeing an email from one of them in your inbox. Strike a balance between interesting work and bearable coworkers.

One, very senior, practitioner recounted that it is quite common for him to hope to be hit by a car. Nothing too serious. Just enough to put him in hospital for a few weeks so he can have a legitimate excuse to get away from work for a bit.

We all commented “Yeah; but everyone feels that.”

But of course, that is the point.

I see the temptation to say suck it up princess. But I feel that’s a luxury that soon wears off. It really hits you when you realise, there is no end to this, and it will be like it for the rest of your working life.

And that’s just at the Bar. Whilst life at the Bar is far from a doddle, at least we don’t have that billable hours culture. There is a bit more flexibility for us. In the end I just moved out to the sticks and got a lot more picky and choosy about what work to take on. And I am very glad I did.

So I am all for ways of mitigating against the stresses and the risk of burnout.

I think where the distinction lies is in your colleagues. I did my four seats and qualified into a busy transactional practice, where I am often very busy but my mental health is completely fine.

One of my seats was also very busy, but my principal and all the partners in the department were complete arseholes. No thank yous, dumping work on you at the last minute then running off, hyper critical and condescending if you made a typo in the documents they had you drafting at 2am, gossiping and badmouthing other trainees in front of me, and just generally being all round bad people and managers. I had a serious injury at one point and had a senior associate calling me to turn comments a few hours after the operation – literally something her secretary could have done. My mental health was fucked, absolutely in the gutter.

In my current team everyone is lovely so, while it gets busy, I’m not also dealing with the pressure of being surrounded by dickheads and office politics. We work for those demanding clients and it isn’t a problem. I regularly work late nights and my mental health is great.

So a lot of it is around expectations and culture, and less about the hours. In my opinion at least.

To whom do I apply for all of these things and to whom do I complain if I am unsuccessful?