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International Bar Association to assess global mental health of lawyers
While the “devastating effects” of mental illnesses have attacked the wellbeing of legal professionals long before COVID-19, the International Bar Association acknowledged that it would have exacerbated the conditions and vowed to address its impacts.
Naomi Neilson
The International Bar Association (IBA) has launched a global project aimed at seeking data and addressing the way mental health impacts legal professionals throughout the world. While long-term issues will be measured in two wellbeing surveys, the IBA also intends to examine the effects of the global pandemic on the world of lawyers.
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To lead the work, president Horacio Bernardes Neto convened a Wellbeing Taskforce, led by IBA bar issues commission officers with assistance from its IBA legal policy and research unit. The key phase consists of two global surveys for individual lawyers and for firms and legal institutions, including bar associations and law societies.
“When I became president of the IBA in 2019, I made addressing mental wellbeing for the legal profession one of my main priorities,” Mr Neto said, adding he was concerned with “all too frequent reports of substance abuse, severe depression and suicide”.
“Little did I or any of us know of the events that were to come. The devastating effects of depression, stress, addiction and the other such attacks on our wellbeing may have preceded the pandemic, but there is no question that it has exacerbated their impact,” he said.
Mr Neto said that while the pandemic has posed challenges for the profession and the way of life for its lawyers, it also presents opportunities for “us to change for the better”. With the survey results, Mr Neto said he hopes to assemble some of the “best thinking and solutions available and present them as part of an ongoing effort to help”.
“I sincerely hope that they will lead not only to the sharing of best practice guides, but also to starting conversations in those parts of the world where mutual wellbeing is not spoken about so openly, and lawyers perhaps find themselves suffering in silence,” Mr Neto said.
