Daniel Lukasik, long an advocate for recognizing and addressing depression among lawyers, has written an article in the summer 2026 edition of The New York State Bar Association Journal entitled “Overcoming Loneliness in the Legal Profession.”
In 2023, Dr. Vivek Murthy, then US Surgeon General, declared loneliness a national public health epidemic, finding its effects on our mental and physical health comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and worse than those caused by obesity. That was followed up with an HHS publication on the healing effects of social connections and community.
Of course, that loneliness epidemic was aggravated in no small part by the country’s response to the epidemic just preceding it–the COVID pandemic. That response condemned everyone to very little professional or social interaction for close to two years. Disengagement from work, families and friends naturally followed. From surveys conducted after COVID, the Harvard Graduate School of Education assembled general data as to who was lonely, what was meant by that, what people saw as the reasons we were lonely and also possible fixes.
But we know that loneliness is not a recent development in the general population and certainly not among lawyers. Long before COVID, a study conducted in 2016 by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the ABA’s Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs documented lawyers’ significant levels of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and even thoughts of suicide, in each case several times greater than the occurrence among the general population, concluding that “the consequences of attorney impairment . . . are profound and far-reaching.” Additional research added that lawyers are lonelier than any other profession. Lawyers went on to experience even greater distress than other professions during COVID. And that loneliness has not been relieved, as a survey taken as recently as 2024 again found that lawyers are the loneliest of all professionals.
Loneliness not only has profound impacts on our mental health but also leads to poor cognitive function and to physical ailments such as high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, Parkinson’s’ disease, cancer, heart disease, and early death.
All of this and other information is reiterated in Lukasik’s article. Here are his suggestions for how to start chipping away at such a devastating scourge.
- Take advantage of talk therapy and find peer support
- Delete addictive apps, put down your phone and build authentic connections
- Maximize micro-connections, despite their fleetingness
- Volunteer
Those suggestions, as Lukasik elaborates on them, are in accord with those made by the people Harvard surveyed:
- Reach out to family and friends
- Learn to love yourself
- Learn to be more forgiving of others
- Find ways to help others
Time may be of the essence is more ways than one. Making time for these important endeavors may give you more and happier times ahead.