Instead of suggesting that lawyer well-being is uniquely bad, future studies should rely on more up-to-date and accurate datasets to develop effective interventions.
The National Health Interview Survey finds that lawyers are less likely to exhibit mental illness than the general population but are more likely to abuse alcohol than similarly educated peers. [UPDATE: This is Yair Listokin & Ray Noonan's post, but I inadvertently failed to include their bylines at first -- sorry about that.]
Conventional wisdom says that lawyers are uniquely unhappy—but this wisdom rests on a weak empirical foundation, and a large public health dataset provides a more accurate and nuanced story.
