Whether it is because they are members of a stressful, high-stakes profession or because personalities with a penchant for addictive disorders are drawn to the law, studies have shown that lawyers have twice the addiction rate of the general population and are three times as likely to be depressed.The article goes on to allege that law school is a breeding ground for addiction, mostly by custom, and that 20-40% of law students are depressed.
As if that weren't enough, lawyers are also notoriously reluctant to seek help for these problems...."Lawyers are uniquely treatment resistant," said Dr. Link Christin, adjunct professor of law at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota...
This had me thinking about the nature of AA and the nature of law schools. Having never been to an AA meeting, I can't give any personal knowledge, but my understanding is that the whole point is that you solve a problem by finding there are others like you who face analogous situations and admitting that group help is necessary. Thus, an individual problem is countered with the power of numbers via group support.
It seems to me that law school, in many ways, is the opposite. When one comes as a law school, they come on individual achievement. Up to that point in time, most law students have excelled in the academic sense, at least relative to their peers. In law school, they meet dozens and dozens of people who are exactly like them and often went to law school for the exact same reason. The same sense of uniqueness and exceptionalism that gave rise to thoughts of succeeding in law (and investing tens of thousands in an education) is destroyed by the introduction of two hundred carbon copies. The identical members of the group cause a breakdown of the belief of uniqueness, of success, of achievement.
Thus, a sort-of cognitive dissonance develops. The young lawyer has been trained to believe he or she is exceptional. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise, even for the top 10% graduates. I'm not going to play armchair psychiatrist and say this leads to addictions, but it can't help, and it certainly can't help in treating addiction.
It seems to me that the root problem here is that you have people who on some latent level believe they're some sort of superhumans. While the article speaks of innovative therapy programs targeted solely at lawyers and law school awareness programs, my gut feeling is that the problem needs to be addressed significantly earlier, possibly as far back as high school.
If putting people on a pedestal and calling them exceptional for what are frankly non-exceptional things causes psychological problems that make one resistant to addiction therapy, maybe we should stop putting kids on pedestals for non-exceptional things.