Everyone feels occasional stress. But there's substantial evidence that we lawyers are disproportionately subject to pressures or demands that produce chronic stress.
Research demonstrates that lawyers suffer from a high incidence of depression.
According to one national study, the legal profession tops the list of occupations with statistically significant elevations of major depressive disorder. Other studies show elevated rates of lawyerly anxiety, hostility, obsessive-compulsiveness and alienation. They show that as a group, we are in poor health. Moreover, they show that we are much more likely to be alcoholics or problem drinkers than the general population. Most of us manage to cope with the stress in our professional lives without becoming clinically depressed or abusing alcohol.