We learned that it is not to be discussed. The “it” is mental health, and we learned wrong.

The legal profession has long acculturated Bar and Bench to project smarts, strength and stoicism. Never let them see you sweat. When the going gets tough, stiffen the spine and power through. We have all seen colleagues whose bravado, deflection, workaholism or lifestyle cover up difficult realities. Maybe we experience this cover-up impulse ourselves.

Blanket denials and cover-ups rarely work for long and they can risk serious ethical challenges when we least expect them.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This column is for attorneys and judges who experience accumulated stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, dissatisfaction and other core mental wellness challenges—which means many of us at one time or another.

Combating Stigma
Our profession is full of smart and hardworking people who sacrifice much for work. Attorneys and judges often identify with our minds and personalities that propel us forward. 

Even so (precisely so), countless studies probe our profession’s high stress (deadlines, clients, conflicts, lack of control, economics) and isolation (reading and writing). Our success ethic, in turn, adds pervasive stigma that inhibits lawyers and judges from naming impacts on mental acuity, productivity, resilience, effectiveness and physical health.
What lawyer wants to confess to feeling scattered or struggling? Speaking such truths—much less acting responsibly on them—can feel risky to one’s standing, income, self-image and prospects. To date, few attorneys have been courageous like Joe Milowic, who “came out” in the New York Law Journal as a Big Law partner with clinical depression.¹ 

Stigma is toxic to our profession’s truthful reckoning with mental health. Stigma twists mental health challenges into perverse feedback loops of denial and harsh judgment (including self-judgment), which exacerbate problems and inhibit needed help.

Combating stigma means making it not only safe but also expected and praiseworthy to get real and get help, long before life challenges become professional ethics challenges. This need is urgent. The New York State Bar Association’s 2021 report, “This is Us: From Striving Alone to Thriving Together,” spoke of stigma fully 52 times in 165 pages.² WCBA’s 2023 Task Force on Attorney Well-Being and the Post-COVID Practice of Law report focused on stigma for women and especially mothers.³ Disproportionate stigma also impacts racial minorities, LGBTQ persons and first-generation professionals.⁴

For physical therapists and professional athletes, tending one’s own body is not weak or shameful: the body is a professional tool. For lawyers and judges, our professional tool is the mind. Why should mental health be any different for us?
It should not. For professionalism, and to combat stigma, lawyers and judges should routinize regular mental health check-ups, and seek help at the first sign of anything more than a short-term funk or minor turbulence. For us especially, mental and emotional healthcare must be as common and accepted as visits to internists and dentists.⁵ 

“The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back”
If health and happiness are not sufficient cause to get real and get help, consider ethics. The Official Reports are full of discipline cases in which mental health figures prominently.

Infamous and tragic is the upstate judge who jailed a courtroom full of defendants after a cell phone rang.⁶ The judge testified to “experiencing deep-seated difficulties in his marriage,” and his “way of dealing with them was to ‘bury’ himself into his work and suppress the marital strains he was experiencing.” The judge offered psychologist testimony that the ringing phone triggered a pre-existing “anxious crisis state of mind” and suddenly became the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”⁷ Removing him from the bench, the Court of Appeals declined to let mental health challenges exculpate and implied that the judge should have sought needed help sooner.⁸

Another judge fell behind and covered it up with late and false quarterly reports. The judge blamed drinking and depression. Removing the judge, the Court found that she was “unwilling or unable” to serve, in part because she repeatedly declined “efforts to assist her.”⁹

To be sure, life challenges can be a mitigating factor, sometimes a potent one. After neglecting a client matter and failing to respond to the Grievance Committee, one attorney avoided suspension because the cause was a “severe undiagnosed, untreated depression” that the attorney proactively addressed, then adopted remedial measures in their practice.¹⁰ For another who neglected client matters for mental health reasons, the court converted a disciplinary proceeding to a disability-based suspension on finding that the attorney diligently was pursuing treatment.¹¹ Recently, the Second Department reduced a penalty for misappropriation—typically at least a six-month suspension—to public censure in view of “extraordinary family and personal health concerns” causally connected with the misconduct.¹²

Only rarely, however, will life challenges totally avert substantial discipline. Especially if misconduct is serious, most lawyers who plead mental health challenges still face suspension, but with mitigation for proactive treatment, complete cooperation and genuine remorse.¹³

What Do Mental Health Concerns Ask of Us?
Speak the truth, before something happens. It is vital to speak about struggles affecting our work. Under Judiciary Law Section 499, lawyers and judges can speak confidentially 24/7 with a bar-sponsored Lawyer Assistance Program (“LAP”), which offers many services including referrals. The two closest LAPs are via the New York State Bar (Tel.: 877.772.8835) and New York City Bar (Tel.: 212.302.5787). I myself serve with the New York State Bar LAP and am available to speak under the confidentiality assurance of Section 499 (Tel.: 914.552.9219).

Maintain competence or pull back. Whatever one’s mental health, competence under Rule 1.1(a) (lawyers) and Rule 100.3(B)(1) (judges) is non-negotiable.¹⁴ While New York has not yet joined other jurisdictions in defining competence to include the “mental, emotional and physical ability reasonably necessary” for a matter,¹⁵ Rule 1.1(b) charges lawyers with knowing that they must not take or keep a matter they are unfit to handle. The duty then is to associate with another attorney or bring a motion to withdraw pursuant to Section 321 of New York Civil Practice Law and Rules (“CPLR”).

Supervise kindly and responsibly. Under Rule 5.1(d), attorney supervisors having direct authority over an impaired lawyer can be liable for their misconduct unless they make reasonable effort to address the impairment. Reasonable efforts begin by kindly “confronting” the attorney with concern to “insist”—even “forcefully urging”—that they seek appropriate help and failing that “limiting [their] ability … to handle legal matters.”¹⁶ We cannot turn a willfully blind eye.

Discern duty to report. It can be awkward at best to report a colleague, especially amidst a mental health concern. Kindness suggests first trying to approach them, discreetly and with genuine care. Ethically, reporting sometimes is mandatory. Other than an attorney who learns of misconduct in a confidential Judiciary Law Section 499 context,¹⁷ Rule 8.3(a) requires an attorney who “knows” of another’s violation that “raises a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthy or fitness as a lawyer” to report it. Under Rule 100.3(D)(2), a judge “who receives information indicating a substantial likelihood that a lawyer has committed a substantial violation” must take “appropriate action.”

Participate responsibly in evaluation. Even before a formal investigation, a Grievance Committee may require an attorney to undergo medical evaluation for impairment. Though this power is rarely invoked, non-cooperation is prejudicial to the administration of justice and thus potentially a Rule 8.4(d) violation.¹⁸ 

Conclusion
Life happens, and there is no shame in naming impacts on mental health. Our profession has ways to go in addressing mental health challenges, and there is no way forward except step by step, person by person. Let kindness and candor be our guides.

My phone is on.

Endnotes
1. J. Milowic, “Quinn Emanuel Partner Suffers from Depression and He Wants Everyone to Know,” N.Y.L.J., Mar. 28, 2018, at 
2. New York State Bar Assn., “Report of the Committee on Attorney Well-Being” (Oct. 2021). 
3. Westchester County Bar Assn., “Report and Recommendations of the WCBA Task Force on Attorney Well-Being and the Post-COVID Practice of Law” (May 2023).
4. See E. Lang, “Going Beyond the Fear in Addressing Attorney Mental Health,” 75 Mercer L. Rev. 782 (2023); K. Cokley, et al., “Lawyering While Black,” 48 J Black Psych. 2 (2022); A. Imparato, “Addressing Mental Illness in the Legal Workplace,” Minority Corp. Counsel Assn. (2005).
5. D. Markus, (with A. Manevitz, M. Rimalower, et al.), “It’s Time To Normalize Mental Health Check-Ups for Lawyers,” 6 Harv. J. Legal Prof. 3 (2020).
6. In re Restaino, 10 N.Y.3d 577 (2008).
7. Id., at 586.
8. See id., at 589 & n.8.
9. See In re Washington, 100 N.Y.2d 873, 877 (2009)
10. See Matter of Rand, 149 A.D.3d 194 (N.Y. App. Div., 2d Dep’t 2017.
11. See Matter of Soloway, 203 A.D.3d 187 (N.Y. App. Div., 1st Dep’t 2022).
12. Matter of Pitkowsky, __ A.D.3d __, 2025 N.Y. Slip Op. 01372, *4 (2d Dep’t, Mar. 12, 2025).
13. See e.g. Matter of Levine, 200 A.D.3d 62 (N.Y. App. Div.,1st Dep’t 2021) (six-month suspension); Matter of Grace, 198 A.D.3d 145 (N.Y. App. Div., 2d Dep’t 2021) (18-month suspension); In re Castillo, 145 A.D.3d 1177 (N.Y. App. Div., 3d Dep’t 2016) (three-year suspension).
14. ABA Formal Op. 03-429 (2003).
15. See e.g. Rule 1.1(b)(ii) in California, Utah, Virginia and Vermont; see also A.B.A. Model Rule 1.16(2)(a); D.C. Bar Ethics Opn. 377 (2017).
16. ABA Formal Op. 03-429.
17. See Rule 8.3(c)(2).
18. See In re Brodsky, 65 A.D.3d 248 (N.Y. App. Div., 2d Dep’t 2009.