Stress: any progress on the common enemy?

Six years after the Scottish Young Lawyers Association (SYLA) revealed how solicitors viewed mental health in the workplace, the Law Society's Careers and Wellbeing Manager, Olivia Moore, puts it back under the microscope for Stress Awareness Week to understand how far we’ve come and what’s left to do.

In 2016 the SYLA wrote a groundbreaking article which made us all sit up and think about mental health in the law. ‘Stress: the common enemy’ challenged the profession and the Law Society to consider the very real impact of mental health on the future of the profession, which to that stage hadn’t been done in any meaningful way.

Eight years on and ahead of the release of our latest Lawscot Wellbeing action plan, it’s a good opportunity to take stock of where we are compared to where we were. Has anything changed?

As someone who works on the legal wellbeing agenda every day, it can sometimes feel like wading through treacle. While culture change can be glacial, particularly when you want organisations outside of your own to be evolving, seismic events like Covid can shatter the cultural landscape and accelerate the need to navigate a new environment.

Eight years ago, we were in a position where speaking about stress and mental health was deemed a topic off-limits:

“In trying to understand the issue better, one aspect which struck us is how reluctant the Scottish profession is to talk about the issue. Finding a place for open and frank discussions to take place on mental wellbeing in the profession was tricky. The issue receives (perhaps unsurprisingly) little attention in Scotland.”

My observation would be that there has been an opening up of conversations around mental health across society and the legal profession has been no exception, undeniably hastened by the pandemic. I would no longer say there is no place to talk about stress in the profession, or mental health more generally.

Our engagement figures speak for themselves. In the last five years, we have hosted around 40 wellbeing-focused events for the profession, attracting over a thousand attendees. There is clearly an appetite for engagement among employers with increased adoption of the Mindful Business Charter, development of internal wellbeing strategies and roles like Wellbeing Manager, Mental Health First Aider or staff Wellbeing Networks to formalise wellbeing support in the workplace.   

As the SYLA identified in their article, raising awareness of the issue can be a first step in normalising the stigma associated with it. However, there is still a long way to go:

In 2016, the article included several case studies:

“I have concerns over the stigma attached with letting people know that I struggle. Within the profession I feel that mental health isn’t taken very seriously.”

“I was scared to speak to my boss because I thought he would think that I was unable to cope with a normal workload and that I would then not be kept on.”

Our recent data tells us that the majority of people we surveyed still wouldn’t discuss their mental health at work for fear of the reaction they would receive:

• 41% of respondents would discuss their mental health without the fear of reaction they would receive from managers (a small improvement on the figure of 37% from our 2017 survey)
• 43% of respondents would discuss their mental health without the fear of reaction they would receive from managers (compared to 42% from our 2017 survey)

It is positive that we now have data to rely on. In 2016, the SYLA correctly identified that we had never had any major survey or qualitative research has been conducted on the impact of stress on Scottish lawyers. Since then, in 2017 we ran our landmark wellbeing survey in partnership with See Me to assess the status of mental health stigma and discrimination in the legal profession, then in 2023 conducted follow up research incorporated into our flagship Profile of the Profession survey. Coupled with that, there has been a comprehensive Life in the Law survey run by LawCare and the International Bar Association conducted a global study into mental wellbeing.

Responding to good data is one of the most powerful levers we can pull to encourage employers to act. The only way we can anticipate how to improve culture is to first understand where the problems lie. Underpinning our ‘Creating a wellbeing strategy’ guide is the need to listen and respond to the direct feedback of colleagues.

The SYLA talked specifically about their concerns of “negative stress” – recognising the harmful impacts of long-term acute stress and the effects it can have on minds and bodies long-term. In our most recent survey, we asked people how much their work played a part:

50% of respondents said their work was a source of unhealthy stress (i.e. stress that is prolonged, or becomes unmanageable).

This is a sobering statistic and should make us ask serious questions about why this is. What is it about the law that is so stressful? What is it about your organisation specifically? What is it that affects certain teams in particular?

The answer will be different dependent on so many factors and the answer might even be different for those in the same team. But this statistic should give some employers pause for thought and ask themselves: ‘what’s unhealthy about our organisation?’

35% of our respondents reported experiencing burnout and 15% said they had felt unable to cope in the last five years due to stress. All of these statistics show us that these are not isolated incidents and the same challenges permeate in different guises throughout our legal workplaces.

One of the big changes we have seen in the last few years in relation to stress and mental health has been garnering leadership buy-in to talk about the issues seriously. We have come a long way in many workplaces from ‘the issue being swept under the carpet’ in 2016.

Looking forward over the next few years, we aim for Lawscot Wellbeing to advance beyond positive engagement and ask some of the tough questions about why poor mental health is so prevalent in our profession and why unmanageable stress is a perennial problem.

What structures are unique challenges to the legal profession? How could we overcome them? What’s our role as a Law Society? Can we learn from other industries?

The SYLA hoped to start a conversation with their 2016 article and they achieved far more than that. But their initial call to the profession to act still stands. We still have so far to go. Critically, how do we preserve the future of our profession? No one wants to run a business riddled with stress, and no one wants to work in one.