Mental Health Literacy for Lawyers 2024

How Mental Health Literacy Makes Lawyers More Successful

Whether they’re handling cases with clients affected by stress, trauma, anxiety, or substance abuse, or struggling with these issues themselves, lawyers benefit from advanced understandings of mental health ---- that is, from mental health literacy. In this presentation, lawyer wellness retreat leader Jennifer Mohamed, JD, RYT-500 helps attorneys understand the concept of mental health literacy and more deeply appreciate its importance for lawyers themselves and their success in working with clients. The presentation offers enhanced awareness of how substance abuse/dependence disorders, stress management, and work-life balance relate to the practice of law. In it, Attorney Mohamed provides lawyers with strategies for improving their capacity to identify the mental health and well-being challenges frequently experienced by lawyers and clients and familiarizes them with proven practices for improving health, stress management, and work-life balance in the interest of their careers. The presentation emphasizes how attorney well-being aligns with rules of professional responsibility and increases participants’ overall success as lawyers.

Q&A/Break

What Lawyers Need to Know About Personality Disorders

Personality disorders, characterized by maladaptive ways of interacting with others, reveal themselves in behaviors ranging from severe avoidance and fearfulness to bold, presumptuous, and inconsiderate or aggressive violations of others and of the law. In this training, Dr. David Lee provides insights into personality disorders as psychologists currently define them, how lawyers can identify the most dramatic personality disorders --- those that often show up in the legal system --- and how to deal with individuals with these challenging personalities. He will introduce lawyers to how personality disorders develop, key features of histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and anti-social personalities, and the prospects for treating people whose behaviors align with these diagnoses.

Q&A/Break

Balancing Emotional Highs and Lows with Clients and Colleagues

This session will provide a scientific framework for understanding the emotional responses of your clients and colleagues. Attendees will learn how one’s nervous system adapts to environmental challenges and how chronic activation of the stress response may lead to the development of mood disorders. Attendees will become familiar with the concept of the window of tolerance for emotional regulation and how to recognize common symptoms that signal emotional dysregulation. Finally, the session will offer strategies, appropriate to your role as an attorney, to assist your clients and colleagues in recognizing and regulating their emotional states to improve outcomes in your work.

Q&A

Lunch (on your own)

Trauma is the Thief that Keeps on Stealing After the Crime: Fundamental Facts for Lawyers

Not all challenging events are traumatic, and not all traumatic events lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). What distinguishes the traumatic events that result in PTSD from those that don’t? How do post-traumatic experiences show up in the lives of the people attorneys represent, and how do they interfere with the achievement of the goals attorneys and their clients share? How do people recover from trauma, post-traumatic stress, and acute stress responses? In this presentation, Dr. Amber Ault, LCSW, introduces lawyers to key concepts in traumatology, including the conditions that increase the chances of someone developing PTSD following challenging events (including situations that may arise in legal proceedings), symptoms of post-traumatic syndromes, and approaches clinicians use to help people recover.

The Nuts and Bolts of Trauma-Informed Lawyering

As a rule, attorneys deal in facts, carefully crafted legal analysis argumentation, and rules that govern conduct both inside and outside the courtroom. But attorneys are also in the “people” business, and the people – crime victims, witnesses, clients – have often experienced extraordinary trauma. The trauma that arises from high-conflict divorce, personal injury, criminal victimization, and medical malpractice can have lasting effects on individuals and their communities. Criminal defense attorneys, civil attorneys, family law attorneys, and general practitioners guide clients through systems foreign to them while they are still deep within the throes of the traumatic situations that brought them to the courthouse. In this session on trauma informed lawyering, regional Violence Against Women Resource Prosecutor Kimberly A. Hardtke, introduces the trauma informed lawyering practices designed to mitigate exacerbating non-lawyers’ existing trauma and prevent secondary trauma from encounters with the legal system. Trauma-informed principles can and should also be used in substantive ways when collecting statements, eliciting testimony, or arguing a particular position in court. In this session, you’ll become familiar with these substantive techniques at the foundation of strong, trauma-informed cases.

Break

Risky Business: Assessing Dangerousness to Self and Others and Understanding Wisconsin’s Chapter 51

Sarah Henrickson, LCSW, Amanda Canessa, Solomon Gatton

• Part 1: Fundamentals of Practice and Process: Mental health crises present social workers, lawyers, judges, families, and community members with complex, nuanced, fraught, and dangerous situations in which the interests of individuals’ rights, liberties, and preferences sometimes conflict with community interests, medical guidance, and other legal considerations. In the first segment of this two-hour session, veteran crisis worker and Journey Mental Health Clinical Team Leader Sarah Henrickson, LCSW, Assistant Dane County Corporation Counsel Amanda Canessa, and State Assistant Public Defender and Mental Health Practice Coordinator Solomon Gatton describe their professional work with people experiencing a range of serious mental health crises and conditions. Participants will learn the variables that increase a person’s risk of harming themselves or others due to a mental health crisis or condition, the circumstances in which mental health professionals are empowered to collaborate with law enforcement to use Wisconsin Chapter 51 to advance an emergency detention for mental health reasons, and how such cases are handled by county Corporation Counsel attorneys and public defenders when emergency detentions are initiated.
• Part 2: Questions, Conundrums, and Applications In the second segment of this two-hour session, the presenters and attendees will work through case examples, bringing to the conversation the legal criteria and considerations connected to their respective roles in such cases. Participants will have opportunities to ask questions, think through scenarios with the group, and contemplate how mental health crises might show up in their own areas of practice. As the final session of the day in the Mental health Literacy for Lawyers, this session will encourage participants to integrate the day’s learning about mental health conditions, trauma-informed lawyering, and the most acute situations that require legal intervention.

Program Concludes