Town Hall sparks conversation on personal satisfaction: 'This is a life's work for all of us, trying to figure out how to be happy'.

Happiness as a lawyer is not dependent on income or making partner in a large firm. Rather satisfaction doing work deemed important, healthy relationships with others, and having a sense of "autonomy and authenticity."

Florida State University Law Prof. Larry Krieger, who has spent a generation teaching and researching lawyer satisfaction, was the speaker February 20 at the first of The Florida Bar's Town Hall meetings addressing the health and wellness of lawyers and getting feedback on what the Bar can do to help its members achieve more personal satisfaction.

While a mixed crowd of law students and lawyers munched on a buffet of salad, chicken skewers, and pita bread in the rotunda of the Florida State University College of Law in Tallahassee, Bar President Michael Higer repeated the sobering statistics about attorney mental afflictions and Krieger discussed the findings from his and others' research.

Higer said it's not surprising that lawyers have so many mental, stress, and satisfaction problems.

"We're workaholics. We work 24/7 and we work weekends, we work 65-plus hour weeks, and we're proud of it," he said. "We wear it as a badge of honor that 'I worked all day Saturday, I worked all day Sunday, and I worked until 8 or 9 at night.'"

Plus, the nature of the legal system is adversarial and antagonistic, and lawyers hate to lose cases for their clients--"We take their burdens and we make them our burdens," he said.

Consequently, these statistics are not surprising, Higer said:

* 18 percent of lawyers, or double the number in the general population, have alcohol problems.

* 19 percent have "high anxiety" disorders.

* "33 percent of us are diagnosed with a mental disorder."

* Lawyers are 3.6 times as likely to suffer from depression as the general population.

* That high depression rate means lawyers are twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.

* 33 percent of lawyers, according to a Bar study, suffer from high stress.

* 32 percent struggle with the work/life balance.

* "And here's the one that is crushing to me as a lawyer --because I love being a lawyer--and that's that 70 percent of us, if we could, would change our careers."

* As for law students--and Higer joked that those in the audience must be wondering what they signed up for after he presented the lawyer statistics--23 percent report mild to moderate anxiety, 14 percent have severe anxiety, 17 percent suffer from depression and 6 percent have serious...