The internet is full of blogs from frustrated law students seething about the greed of lawyers, the insanely high law school tuition and student debt, and the unreasonable expectations many people have about how much lawyers are getting paid.
At least one person is gunning for attorneys to get a little loveand it’s a non-lawyer! Steve Hughes has campaigned for and gotten April 13th recognized as “National Be Kind To Lawyers Day.” April 13th – placed strategically after April Fool’s Day but before April 15th (tax day) is a day to honor the approximately 1,143,358 working and inactive attorneys in the United States. Hughe says that on this day, you should take a lawyer you know to lunch, thank a lawyer that might have helped you in the past, or even just a day without the lawyer jokes would be a nice thing to think about.
The honest truth is that lawyers may need to be shown a little more kindness than we may think. According to a Johns Hopkins University survey of over 12,000 employees spanning over twenty eight occupations, lawyers are more likely to experience depression. In actuality, lawyers are four times more as likely to suffer from depression from the average worker.
Clinical studies have demonstrated that at any given time, between three to nine percent of the population might suffer from depression. Yet a research study of lawyers shows us that nineteen percent were plagued with the debilitating mental illness. And a decade ago, a survey taken by the North Carolina Bar Association showed that almost twenty percent of lawyers who responded showed symptoms of clinical depression, with almost twelve percent confessing that they contemplate suicide at least once a month.
In 1992, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health’s Annual Report revfealed that male lawyers between the ages of twenty and sixty four were at least twice as likely as the general population to tragically commit suicide. To cement this fact, the American Bar Association tells us that suicides among attorneys are two to six times the rate of the general population.
Mallory Megan works for a debt collection company. Also she writes articles on business, finance, consumer spending and collection agencies.
