Lawyer Seeks Treatment, Boss Seeks Assurance

"Lawyers are treatment resistant," says William Messinger, a lawyer and the president of Aureus, Inc., a St. Paul, Minnesota, company that assists legal professionals and their employers with recovery and relapse prevention strategies. "Lawyers ask a lot of questions and are not selfr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:GPSolo 2009-10, Vol.26 (7), p.25
Main Author: Scott, Todd C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Addictions
Addictive behaviors
Airlines
Alcoholism
Attorneys
Behavior modification
Employee problems
Mental depression
Pilots
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Summary:"Lawyers are treatment resistant," says William Messinger, a lawyer and the president of Aureus, Inc., a St. Paul, Minnesota, company that assists legal professionals and their employers with recovery and relapse prevention strategies. "Lawyers ask a lot of questions and are not selfrevealing," says Messinger. Such attributes are generally seen by treatment counselors as uncooperative behavior and can delay effective recovery for the lawyer. Messinger also points out that firm culture often serves as a barrier preventing the chemically dependent lawyer from getting effective treatment. "The whole [recovery] process is counter-intuitive to the legal profession," says Messinger. "In a law firm, showing support often means covering up for the lawyer instead of letting him or her fail so the problem can be identified." The three components to a successful strategy of getting a healthy, recovering lawyer back to work are: (1) dealing with the issue head-on with the purpose of helping troubled lawyers accept that they have a problem they cannot deal with on their own; (2) primary treatment for ridding the lawyer of the alcohol and drugs that are in the body's system and are the paramount cause of the lawyer's life-disrupting behaviors; and (3) intense aftercare programming designed to identify the underlying issues in the lawyer's life that led to the addiction and the troubling behavior. There is a direct correlation between the length of time in aftercare programming - with ongoing monitoring and support to help lawyers stay in touch with the systems and tools that got them on the right path - and the lawyers' chances of a full recovery with no relapses. "If you aren't going to do the right thing," [Collins] cautions employers, "you should start thinking about the reasons why you didn't because you are going to need them."
ISSN:1528-638X
2163-1727