BarCARES Leadership on Lawyer Well-Being: Ed Ergenzinger
May is not only Mental Health Awareness Month, but also Lawyer Well-Being Week — a time to raise awareness about mental health and encourage action and innovation across the profession year-round to improve well-being (wellbeingweek.org). We called on members of the NCBA BarCARES Initiative leadership team to share their own personal experiences with well-being to help us dive deeper into the meanings behind this annual observance and provide advice for bettering one’s own well-being as a legal professional.
Our first Q&A is with Ed Ergenzinger, one of four vice presidents of the NCBA BarCARES Initiative, as well as a seasoned life sciences intellectual property attorney and adjunct professor of law:
Q: This year’s theme is “Tending Joy.” What does Tending Joy mean to you?
A: To me, “Tending Joy” means learning to cultivate joy through positive psychology practices like developing and maintaining an optimistic outlook.
That can be hard in the legal profession. Lawyers are professional catastrophizers. We’re trained to look for what can go wrong and rewarded for seeing risk before anyone else does. That skill is useful, but it can also become a way of living.
When I talk about maintaining a positive outlook, I don’t mean pretending everything is fine. I mean trying not to dwell on the things that pull me down while making time for the things that lift me up. Listening to music, painting, cooking, writing and teaching are all part of my personal prescription for tending joy.
Q: Lawyer Well-Being Week follows a daily schedule where each day focuses on a distinct dimension of holistic well-being. How do you like to strive for each of these dimensions in your own life?
Monday — Physical Well-Being
A: The brain and the body are not two distinct domains. Taking care of your overall health has a positive effect on your mental health. But that doesn’t mean you have to do something as extreme as training for a marathon. More manageable goals can have a significant impact on mental health. Am I sleeping enough? Am I eating well? Am I moving and staying active?
I don’t always get it right. But I try to treat sleep, medication, nutrition, movement and recovery as part of my mental health care, not as optional extras.
Tuesday — Spiritual Well-Being
A: For me, spiritual well-being is about feeling like I’ve found a greater purpose. I spent many years building a legal career that looked successful from the outside, but I was also falling apart.
Today, purpose looks different. It includes practicing law, but it also includes speaking openly about mental illness and substance use in the legal profession. It includes teaching law students about mental health. It includes trying to make it easier for the next person to ask for help before they lose as much as I did.
That feels spiritual to me: making something useful out of what nearly killed me.
Wednesday — Career/Intellectual Well-Being
A: I am a former research scientist with a PhD in neuroscience, which means I had a very sophisticated understanding of the brain while doing a remarkably poor job taking care of my own.
Career and intellectual well-being, for me, means staying curious without letting perfectionism take over. I love taking complicated ideas and making them understandable. That has been true whether I was working in patent law, writing about mental health or teaching at law schools. I’m trying to approach my career now in a way that leaves room for being a whole person, not just a productive one.
Thursday — Social Well-Being
A: Mental illness and addiction are isolating. When I was struggling most, I withdrew. I was working remotely, and it became easier for people not to see how bad things had become. By the time I stopped answering emails, I was already in serious trouble.
Social well-being means having people who can see you clearly. Not the resume version. Not the “I’m fine, just busy” version. The real version.
I have been fortunate to have people in my life who did not give up on me, including my wife, Meredith, who told me she could not watch me drink myself to death. That was not an easy thing for her to say, and it was not an easy thing for me to hear. But I needed to hear it.
Connection does not fix everything. But disconnection makes almost everything worse.
Friday — Emotional Well-Being
A: For a long time, I treated emotions as problems to outrun, outwork, outdrink or intellectualize. That did not go particularly well.
For me, emotional well-being means trying to notice what I am feeling before it takes over. It means understanding that anxiety, depression, shame, irritability, exhaustion and fear are not character flaws. They are information that sometimes serve as signals that I need to change things or that I need help.
It also means being honest that professional success does not immunize anyone from mental illness. I’ve had suicidal thoughts while working at an Am Law 100 firm. I once checked the life insurance policy provided by my firm to see whether it would pay out in the event of suicide. That is difficult to say publicly, but I say it because I know there are lawyers who have had similar thoughts and believe they are the only ones.
They are not.
Emotional well-being means asking for help earlier than feels comfortable. It can mean therapy, medication, support, honesty and letting other people carry hope for you until you can carry some of it yourself.
Q: Why is it important that we recognize Mental Health Awareness Month during May, but more specifically, Lawyer Well-Being Week?
A: Mental Health Awareness Month matters because stigma still keeps people silent. Lawyer Well-Being Week matters because our profession has its own particular ways of making silence look like strength.
Lawyers are often rewarded for endurance, perfectionism, competitiveness and availability. We brag about being overworked. We answer emails at all hours. We treat exhaustion as proof that we are serious. And when people start to struggle, they often hide it because they are afraid of being seen as weak, unreliable or unfit to practice.
I understand that fear. During law school, I was afraid to seek counseling for severe anxiety and depression because of character and fitness questions on bar applications. Later in my career, I worried that inpatient treatment would be the end of my career. That fear delayed care I badly needed.
Recognizing Lawyer Well-Being Week helps say out loud what many people already know privately: legal professionals are human beings first. Our well-being is not separate from competence, professionalism or ethics. It is part of them.
This week should not be a box-checking exercise or a few LinkedIn posts about mindfulness. It should be an invitation to change the culture so that people can get help before everything falls apart.
Q: What advice do you have for other legal professionals who may be struggling with well-being?
A: Please do not wait until you have no choice.
I waited too long. I kept trying to manage things privately. I tried to stay productive enough that no one would notice how bad it was. I tried to outrun depression, anxiety, mania, trauma and addiction with work. Eventually, everything caught up with me.
If you are struggling, tell someone. A friend. A doctor. A therapist. A colleague you trust. BarCARES. The Lawyer Assistance Program. Someone.
You do not need to be in full crisis to deserve help. You do not have to prove you are suffering enough. You do not have to wait until your work collapses, your relationships collapse or your body forces the issue.
Also, do not confuse being high-functioning with being healthy. I was still doing sophisticated legal work while drinking heavily. I was still taking on projects while manic. I was still trying to think my way out of illnesses that required treatment.
There is no shame in needing help. There is only unnecessary danger in pretending you do not.
Start with one honest sentence to one safe person: “I’m not okay.” That sentence can change the trajectory of your life.
Q: What have you enjoyed most about serving on the BarCARES Executive Committee?
A: Being part of something practical and compassionate.
I care deeply about big conversations around stigma, culture change, lawyer well-being and mental health in the profession. But when someone is suffering, they also need something concrete. They need a number to call. They need confidential support. They need help that does not require them to already know how to navigate the mental health system.
BarCARES helps provide that.
Serving on the Executive Committee has allowed me to work with people who understand that lawyer well-being is not a branding exercise. It is not just a wellness program or a CLE topic. It is about real people, real families, real careers and sometimes real emergencies.
I also appreciate that BarCARES recognizes something I wish I had understood earlier: help should be easier to access before a person is in crisis.
For me, the most meaningful part has been contributing to a resource that tells members of our profession, quietly but clearly, “You do not have to handle this alone.”
BarCARES is a confidential, short-term intervention program provided cost-free to members of participating judicial district bars, voluntary bar associations and law schools. Learn more about the NCBA BarCARES Initiative.