Trauma and Well-Being Among Legal Professionals

Welcome. This book is intended for lawyers, legal associations, and law students to provide a touchstone for health and well-being as well as insight into secondary trauma and other mental health concerns that may arise within legal practice.

Readers will be introduced to concepts of health and will be provided with tools to measure personal well-being and to help create, motivate, and sustain well-being. Readers will also learn about the outcomes of pressure and stress in the legal profession through case studies and literature reviews.

Along with others, this book continues to work for an international recognition and discussion of health, including mental health, and well-being among legal professionals and students. Listings of resources and statistics are also provided, as are real-life, self-identified, first person narratives.

"At long last, the legal profession is taking stock of the tremendous physical and mental tolls that the practice can exact upon its members. Dawn D'Amico's book arrives at just the right time! Trauma and Well-Being Among Legal Professionals provides the best overview published to date on the behavioral health issues that most frequently beleaguer lawyers. Personally, having lived through the effects of secondary trauma, I wish this book had been available to me during those dark days. What a difference it could have made! And, no doubt, such a difference it will make in the lives of lawyers whose work requires them to face the worst of humanity's horrors."

-Bree Buchanan, JD, MSF, President, Institute for Well-being in Law



"Through Dawn D'Amico's thoughtful and compassionate work, we finally have a book that highlights the impediments to lawyer well-being, the stigma that impedes the search for help, and the pathway to finding better health and contentment. This book, far more than anything I have seen to date, normalizes the search for help and well-being and, in that way, gives us all - lawyers or not- reason to hope and the means to live a meaningful personal and professional life."

-Orlando Da Silva, Chief Administrator and Executive Officer, Administrative Tribunal Support Service of Canada; University of Toronto Faculty of Law; Past President of the Ontario Bar Association



"Trauma and Well-Being Among Legal Professionals is a thoughtful, compassionate and practical guide to the often under-recognized and under-emphasized impacts of the suffering of others on the legal professional's health and state of mind. Filled with examples, provocative insights and tools, Dawn D'Amico's book appeals to the lawyer's whole person and offers guidance to both avoid the negative impacts of secondary trauma but also enhance the capacity to serve clients to the best of one's abilities."

-Mary C. Gentile, PhD, Author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right, University of Virginia Darden School of Businesswww. GivingVoiceToValues.org