‘How We Should Deal With The Implications For Ourselves, Our Colleagues & Our Clients’

Prof. Jim Lucey provides an overview and practical approach to mental health, and you will hear personal stories and learn about mental health, mental illness, and wellness tools. This presentation will be valuable for employers, staff, and for ourselves when we in professional services are working with clients and colleagues.

We recognise that stress and trauma are common features of practicing law today. Yet, few of us know anything about the biology and psychology of stress, and how it indiscriminately takes down even the strongest of us, often without warning.

The particularly, yet typical, challenging daily events or traumas in our lives as lawyers include the likes of difficult clients, the pressures of private practice, fear of complaints/audits/making mistakes, etc. all of which take an enormous toll on our mental (and physical) health. Sadly we don’t appreciate the extent of it until ‘something gives’. We need to be able to recognise what these stressful events are and how we must manage them if we are to value our own health.

Prof. Jim Lucey emphasises the need to build a culture of health and wellness, and of managing conflict in our workplaces. He examines the whole nature of conflict (which we, as lawyers, must deal with every single day), and how it actually affects us mentally and physically, whether that may be due to the particular stresses of the exigencies of our profession, or in our dealings and interactions with others (staff, colleagues and clients).

Prof. Lucy also outlines the broad principles of managing stress and traumatic events in our lives. He looks at the whole area of mental health in society (from where, after all, we get our clients), conflict between people (the idea that “conflict doesn’t go away, so what are we going to do about it?”), and managing our own mental health in our relationships with others. He advocates that properly addressing the nature of conflict in our own lives is a good model for mental health recovery, and for overcoming the challenge of speaking up for ourselves and others with mental health issues in a culture that is stigmatic of mental health.

Category of CPD:	Category C / B / A
Duration:	2.3 Hours