Earlier this week, I posted this tweet:
And hoo boy, did #LawTwitter react. It turns out a lot of us think about harming ourselves (if just a little bit) in order to get a break.
I received a lot more of these responses (and dozens of similar DMs), but this next one meant a lot to me, since the lawyer who wrote it was the first person I ever heard articulate to a group of horrified first-year law students the banality of self-harm:
When Shelly (the author of the last tweet) said out loud that she was wishing for a car accident every single day, I didnt process it as a sick thought at the time. To hear her say it was enormously validating, but still my brain was like, Huh, thats part of the job for everyone, I guess!
My original tweet was part of a larger thread about the self-destructive behaviors endemic to American lawyer culture (and the American workplace overall). The thread itself was a bit of sublimation to help me, and whoever else was reading, process the fifth Kentucky lawyer suicide since Christmas.
In fact, as I was finishing up a piece about the four suicides wed had since Christmas, I heard about number five. And that suicide was just the latest of dozens of colleagues throughout my career. Were talking people in my immediate community, of course; the annual number of lawyer suicides nationwide is in the hundreds, and undiagnosed mental health conditions for American professionals are quite literally countless.
The purpose of this post is to make one simple point: It isnt healthy to want to be sick or injured. For any reason. At all. Not even to get a break from the unyielding samsara of deadlines, demands and dickhead opposing attorneys. If youre thinking I could hurt myself a little to escape for awhile its not that big a leap to thinking I could just kill myself and escape altogether. Thats exactly what many of us do. Making good on that impulse only takes a second.
If youve never experienced the desire to smack your car into a tree or have a minor surgery to escape the demands of your daily life, good on you. You probably didnt need to read this post. Likewise, Im sure there are quite a few people who entertain such thoughts, but recognize them for the dangerous brain parasites they really are. If thats you, please feel free to skip the last few paragraphs.
But if you have had these thoughts and dismissed them as perfectly normal occupational hazards, listen to me: Thats fucked up. You are fucked up. Something is fucked up in your head, and you need to try to fix it before something terrible happens.
Equally important is to remember that if you feel this way, its not your fault. American hyper-capitalism will steal all your time, rob you of your family, take every last bit of joy you have, sap your will to have ever existed, and still demand more. For you professionals, type-A personalities who like to do everything society expects of you, it may take years even decades of juggling chainsaws to realize that your societys expectations are infinite, and will never be met no matter how many hours you put in. If/when you have this realization, youve probably thought about harming yourself in all kinds of creative ways for so long that it just feels like part of your daily routine.
Anyway, I dont pretend to know what anyone else is going through, or how to fix the legal professions blight of suicides. I just know that I was lucky enough to get a break for long enough to realize that wanting to be in a hospital bed isnt healthy in any way, by any standard, in any profession. Its fucked up. Dont let yourself believe its normal.
Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer and law professor. Midwesticismis his short-documentary series about Midwesterners who are making the world a better place. Watch it at: patreon.com/dancanon.
This article appears in March 24, 2021.