Resilience@Law
The College of Law is very proud to be a partner in a milestone initiative within the Sydney legal and legal education community - Resilience@law. Resilience@law is a collaboration between five major national law firms; Allens Arthur Robinson, Blake Dawson, Clayton Utz, Freehills and Mallesons and The College of Law to take a leadership role in raising awareness and understanding of the nature and impact of stress, depression and anxiety across the legal profession. The aim is to make a lasting contribution by developing a learning approach for people at each stage of their legal careers – from graduate lawyers through to partners.
Read an article from the Australian Law Management Journal about the program here.
Objectives
The four objectives of Resilience@law are:
- awareness and education;
- removing the stigma which surrounds mental illness;
- self care strategies; and
- support and resources for mental health concerns [1]
Professor Ian Hickie, in his preface to the Brain Mind Research institute paper Courting the Blues: Attitudes towards depression in Australian law students and lawyers, argues:
"A detailed examination of experiences of mental health problems, as well as assessment of knowledge and attitudes to care-seeking across the legal profession, has the potential to influence greatly our educational and professional response... Although we do not always know why mental health problems are more common among some groups of young people than others, we do know the types of strategies that are likely to result in better outcomes for those affected. They include: access to relevant information; broadening of peer and family support to seek professional help; and active management to provide ongoing personal support within our wider educational and occupational networks. That is, our law schools, legal firms and professional societies can each play key roles in the promotion of better mental health throughout adult life as well as assisting with the prevention of major complications of mental ill-health.” [2]
DVD
As part of the resilience@Law initiative a DVD has been created about mental health in the legal profession and is being widely distributed.
The College have made the DVD available free of charge as part of their commitment to the program.
Educational Module
The College of Law, as part of the collaboration, has developed an educational module to implement the objectives of the group and is reflective of the measures recommended by Professor Hickie.
The module is entitled: Resilience@Law, Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Legal Profession. It was rolled out to the College of Law’s campuses nationwide in January 2011.
Teaching of the program takes place in face-to-face workshops of usually no more than 20 students facilitated by College of Law lecturers and uses a number of modalities including group work, class discussion, workbook activities and use of the DVD.
The workshops cover a lot of ground and include:
- What is resilience?
- Building resilience;
- Understanding stress;
- What is mental illness?
- Responding to mental illness
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Substance misuse
- How to talk about mental health concerns; and
- Getting help for a mental health concern.
In all we will reach about 2,500 graduate lawyers a year – a considerable mental health initiative.
"It is crucial that our key organisations in law and legal education take leadership roles in advocating resilience in study and practice. It is in the education of graduates as they enter the profession that the College seeks to make its most significant contribution and it is proud to be able to offer a new module as part of the Practical Legal Training Program. The module will contribute to better understanding of the issues associated with depression in legal practice and the resources available for dealing with it.”
Neville Carter, CEO & Principal, The College of Law
How to contact us
For a copy of the Resilience@Law DVD please email collaw@collaw.edu.au or phone the Marketing Team at The College of Law 02 9965 7000. Please note that we are able to provide only one copy per request.
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