Sleight of hand: lawyer distress and the attribution of responsibility

For some years in the US, the deleterious effects upon the wellbeing of students studying law have been observed and studies repeatedly show that lawyers suffer disproportionately high levels of depression and addiction. In Australia, Courting the Blues and subsequent studies have found that law students also experience a loss of wellbeing after commencing their law studies and that relatively high levels of distress persist after graduation. Studies have also shown that the Australian legal profession is characterised by high levels of depression and addiction. These findings have led to the wellbeing movement in law, a movement led initially by academics and law student associations, but now receiving institutional attention from law schools and law societies. This movement has the potential to affect significant change to law schools and the profession. There are tensions, however, between the dominant neoliberal discourse and the wellbeing movement. In this paper, I argue that the dominance of neoliberal discourse has achieved a remarkable ‘sleight of hand’ that has attributed responsibility, both in terms of cause and solution, to the individual. In so doing, the structural factors implicated in lawyer and law student distress are effectively erased.