Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

Well, we're into December and for lots of different reasons, December can be a pretty rough month for lawyer mental health. So for the next couple of weeks, we're going to have some re-releases of some episodes in the podcast dealing with mental health. So there will be three episodes. The first episode is going to be about how to take a mental health leave of absence from your firm. The second episode is going to be about disclosing mental health issues or other things like ADHD to your firm, and the third is going to be a conversation that I had with Kelcey Baker back in the summer about the fact that hoping to be hit by a bus is not in fact normal. I hope these episodes are supportive for you, and I'm thinking of all of you this month.

Last week, I talked with Lauren Ascher about accommodations that you could consider asking for if you are a lawyer who has ADHD. This week, I want to talk about something that's related to that. She and I talked about this a little bit, but I think it's a really important conversation and not just about disclosing that you have ADHD, but all sorts of other things like anxiety, depression, other forms of neurodivergence, other forms of mental health issues.

First of all, it's no secret that there is a high incidence rate amongst lawyers of things like anxiety and depression. As I've talked about on the podcast many times before, I personally have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I've also been diagnosed with panic disorder. When we flip over to something like ADHD, we know that lawyers are more likely than the general population to have ADHD.

Of course, as we've discussed with something like ADHD, there are accommodations that you are entitled to legally because ADHD is covered under the ADA, at least if you’re in the States. However, if you're someone who has thought about the question of whether you want to or aren’t going to disclose your ADHD, anxiety, or depression to HR to your workplace, you know the question is much more fraught.

There are lots of reasons why people might choose to disclose, there are also lots of reasons why people feel hesitant about disclosing. I talked about some of these back in the spring with Megan Nogasky, specifically in the episode where she and I talked about taking mental health leave from work.

What I want to talk about today is the fact that it can feel very daunting to think about disclosing something like this at work, even if just to HR, because in order to get accommodations, that is who you would disclose to. But because of the nature of our workplaces in the law, it is often the case that lawyers don't really feel like going to HR and disclosing something is meaningful, that there's not going to be necessarily any sort of meaningful outcome from disclosing to HR, which creates this feeling of I either need to be super open about it in ways that I shouldn't have to and that violate my privacy, or basically not disclose.

There can be a lot of shame around this feeling because, I mean, of course, we're lawyers, so there tends to be a lot of that in the mix for all sorts of reasons, but people often feel well, there are a couple of different ways that this happens. One is particularly when you're talking about something like ADHD, there are a lot of people who still feel that there's a stigma around having ADHD even more so than something like anxiety or depression.

If you're someone who has ADHD, you may be thinking that you don't want to disclose because of how you think other people will view you, or even how you view yourself depending on what messages you may have received in the past about ADHD. As you know, we talked about this in previous episodes talking about ADHD, there are a lot of faulty conceptions about what it is to have ADHD, how it works, what it's like.

But all that to say, sometimes people choose not to disclose because they don't want people to know and I want to just make sure it's super clear, even though the episode last week talked all about accommodations and things that you can ask for, potentially institute in your workplace to help you if you have ADHD, I am not saying if you choose not to disclose that you're doing something wrong because I do think it's an extremely personal decision.

I also want to affirm that many of us as lawyers work in workplaces that don't feel safe to disclose these kinds of things. I think that's often a bigger issue. The reality is that many lawyers work in workplaces where it doesn't feel safe to disclose that you have ADHD or that you are struggling with mental illness like anxiety or depression.

The reason for that is so many of our workplaces as lawyers are so unaccommodating of any sort of need on the part of the people that work there. There is often this implicit, if not explicit, sort of expectation that you're just going to keep going and that the ideal is that we're all some form of basically lawyer robot.

If you're someone who is thinking about disclosing or has thought about disclosing at work that you have ADHD, anxiety, depression, any other sort of mental illness, or neurodivergence, but ultimately have decided not to or feel very conflicted, I just want to affirm you and tell you that whatever sense that you have of your workplace, I don't think it's in your head.

I also think that legitimately, a lot of lawyers look at their situation at work and see that disclosing is not going to have an ultimate impact because of the dysfunctional way in which the workplace is structured because of the fact that HR is so divorced from the day-to-day work, from the ways that work is distributed, and the ways it is assessed, and just pretty much everything about what it is to actually be working in that workplace day to day, I think that it is completely understandable why someone might look at that and say, “It's not worth me violating my privacy to disclose this information given that I see that my workplace is not structured in a way to meaningfully deal with it.”

Now we can have a whole other conversation about the changes that do seem to be happening, albeit quite slowly, particularly within our profession around all of these things. But ultimately, I think that it's important to remember that if you're thinking about disclosing, it truly is a personal decision, there are so many factors, and you’re the authority over your experience.

You know what your workplace is like. I think that there are lots of reasons why you might want to disclose and there are lots of reasons why you might choose not to. I don't want anyone to hear, because we're talking about, for example, accommodations on this podcast, to hear that and think that I'm saying, “Well, you should be disclosing and if you're not, there's something wrong with you.” Because in my experience, lawyers are often looking for what they're doing wrong and the reasons there's something wrong with them.

The question of whether to disclose is a complex one, and it is also very personal. Also, it's something that can change over time. You might decide, “I'm not going to disclose,” and then ultimately at some later date, you might decide, “It's worth disclosing for various reasons,” or that you want to disclose or that you need to disclose because circumstances have changed.

All of those things are okay. There is no one right way to approach the question. I do want to remind you that if you're someone who suspects you might have ADHD but haven't yet been assessed, I do strongly recommend that you consider getting assessed because as you've heard on the podcast from different people, it can really make a huge difference even as an adult to learn that you have ADHD and to incorporate that knowledge into how you make decisions about your career, your life, and all sorts of things.

Thanks for listening to this conversation about disclosure at work. If you have a story about disclosing at work that you would like to share either with me or anonymize with the rest of the podcast audience, I would love to share that. Okay, that's it for now. I will talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.