Jason Ward provides advice to lawyers needing to step away from practice due to mental health

While the main drivers of mental health problems in law are baked into the way the job is structured and push lawyers to keep quiet until they are in serious trouble, there are many supports once lawyers decide to seek help, says mental health advocate and former practising lawyer Jason Ward. Stepping away from your practice, while not without challenges, can often be the best course of action, he says.

Ward points to structural barriers specific to legal practice, such as the daily grind organized around billable-hour pressure, inherent adversarial incentives, constant time-tracking, economic insecurity, and what he calls “a real win–lose culture.” He sees a system that normalizes overwork, perfectionism, and chronic stress, and that leaves many lawyers with limited control over workload and timelines, client demands, and exposure to conflict or ethically uncomfortable positions, which, in turn, produce burnout and moral struggle.

Those pressures nearly ended his own career. Ward had a successful litigation practice in Lindsay, Ontario, before abruptly walking away from the profession after years of alcoholism and a dependency on THC. He now describes that decision as “an act of survival, not surrender,” and says stepping back from the successful practice he founded preserved his life and integrity and stopped a trajectory he knew had become unsustainable and dangerous.

Nearly five years into what he calls life with “no coping substances,” Ward spends his time speaking across North America through his Mentally Speaking platform, sharing his story and using it to force a harder conversation about the conditions lawyers work under. He says addiction often starts as performance management, with substances first used to work longer, sleep less or cope better, and he has learned that hearing a fellow lawyer’s recovery story changes behaviour because lived experience reduces fear and moves lawyers from awareness to action.

He hears the same story repeatedly of longer hours, missed deadlines, rising irritability, social withdrawal and growing reliance on alcohol, drugs, stimulants or sedatives to stay at their desks and blunt mounting anxiety, and he wants those patterns to be treated as a flashing warning light rather than a private failing. “You don’t lose your identity by pausing your practice. You protect it. Untreated illness takes far more time away than the alternative,” he says. He argues that silence, not stepping back, is the real career risk and that early help often preserves competence, judgment and long-term credibility instead of destroying it. Recovery, he insists, “isn’t a weakness. It’s skill-building,” and treatment teaches regulation, insight and resilience that he never learned in the profession.

Ward pushes lawyers to use the supports that already exist but are often ignored. “Confidential help is out there, it’s real and underused by many lawyers. You can start with anonymous or arm’s-length support to lower your fear or barrier to entering into this area of mental health unwellness,” he says. He tells them they do not need to have every symptom mapped out before acting: “You don’t need certainty to start. You only need enough discomfort to really justify an honest conversation with yourself. If you’re doing that, it’s likely time to consider a change.”

He also wants lawyers to understand the fine print that can decide whether they can afford to step away. Ward explains that for the standard insurance offered to lawyers by the Canadian Bar Association, mental health is not excluded from disability coverage, but entitlement to coverage “really turns on capacity to practise law rather than simply having a diagnosis of a mental health condition,” with specialist care and documentation required.

The definition of disability itself can work against lawyers who want to recover. Ward calls the definition of total disability “a bit of a trap,” because under the current policy, “total disability” means not gainfully employed, so paid work of any kind can create disputes even when a lawyer is genuinely unable to practise but still capable of other roles. “You must buy and purchase what’s called the own-occupation rider. It’s critical,” because it removes that gainful employment issue and allows other work while still receiving full benefits. He warns that mental health claims under this policy “are really evidence-driven” and that the process can be “very onerous,” with benefits that “can be modified, they can be withheld, and they can even be clawed back for noncompliance,” which is why lawyers “should really be careful to monitor the coverage and the terms on an ongoing basis.”

Asked how the profession is doing on mental health, Ward is careful not to confuse more talk with real safety. He acknowledges “there are real supports in place for mental health in our profession,” and notes that law societies across Canada fund confidential member assistance programs that provide counselling, addiction support, coaching and peer resources for lawyers. At the same time, he thinks regulators emphasize education, awareness and voluntary use of supports, “while the core drivers of distress – like billable pressure, workload intensity, firm culture, economic insecurity – remain largely untouched,” and he has come to the conclusion that regulators “play a limited but can be an important role.”

On the ground, he sees both progress and persistent fear. Ward says that while conversations are more common, he is still of the view that "many lawyers still fear that disclosure could affect their licensing, their reputation, or career advancement.” He welcomes the surge nationally of the appointment of wellness coordinators, particularly in the mid-size to larger firms, and the growth of peer networks and informal wellness communities, but he continues to see a profession where internalized stigma and structural pressure make lawyers assume they are safer suffering in silence than testing whether that support will hold when they need it most.

This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, which can also be found here:

The episode can also be found on our CL Talk podcast homepage, which includes links to follow CL Talk on all the major podcast providers.