Heinrich Boll Foundation Scholarship

The Silence That Kills: Why Lawyers Don't Talk About Mental Health (And What To Do About It)

There is a particular feeling that Nigerian lawyers know well, even if they have never put a name to it. It arrives on Sunday evening, somewhere between the last hour of rest and the moment the week begins again. You are not at the office but your mind already is, running through the briefs you did not finish, the client who called three times on Friday, the matter that is set for Monday and has more holes in it than you would like to admit. You are not resting. You stopped being able to rest a while ago, and somewhere along the way, you accepted that as normal.This article is about that acceptance, and why it is costing lawyers in Nigeria more than most of them realise.The legal profession in Nigeria has a serious and largely unspoken mental health problem. This is not a secret to anyone inside the profession, which is precisely what makes the silence so striking. Lawyers are aware that the work is grinding, that the culture is brutal in places, that something is often not right. They know it and they stay quiet, and the staying quiet is not an accident. It is a professional calculation, one that makes complete sense in the short term and causes serious harm over time.The logic runs like this: your reputation for composure and competence is, in many ways, your most valuable professional asset. A litigator who cannot hold themselves together in court loses credibility. A corporate associate who admits to struggling gets quietly moved off the important matters. An in-house counsel who tells the CEO they are overwhelmed stops being the person the CEO calls first. The professional cost of appearing vulnerable is concrete and arrives quickly. The cost of staying silent feels abstract and distant. So lawyers choose the silence, and the debt accumulates.What makes this conversation particularly difficult in Nigeria is that the silence has additional reinforcement on every side.Nigerian legal culture is built on hierarchy and the expectation of endurance. Whether you are a junior associate at a commercial firm in Victoria Island, a lawyer in a federal ministry drafting regulations that may or may not be read, or in-house counsel at a bank fielding calls from the trading desk at all hours, the unspoken expectation is the same: absorb it, deliver, and do not make your difficulties someone else's problem. Telling a principal or a head of department that you are struggling is not a neutral disclosure in that environment. It is a risk, and most lawyers have already done the cost-benefit analysis and decided against it.The problem is also invisible to many of the people it affects, because the image of the struggling lawyer is almost always the litigator, the barrister in court with a troubled case and a difficult client. This leaves out an enormous part of the profession. The corporate lawyer billing eighteen-hour days on a transaction that keeps restructuring does not see himself in that image. The bank's head of legal who has not taken an uninterrupted holiday in four years does not see herself. The government lawyer who is technically protected by civil service rules and practically ignored by everyone above her does not feel entitled to the language of professional suffering because, from the outside, her job looks stable. These lawyers are not exempt from the problem. They are simply not in the conversation, and so they conclude, wrongly, that the problem is not theirs.The numbers tell a different story. A 2016 study involving nearly 13,000 lawyers found that 28 percent met criteria for depression and 19 percent for anxiety. The International Bar Association, following a global survey of legal professionals, found that one in ten young lawyers had experienced suicidal thoughts, not burnout, not job dissatisfaction, suicidal thoughts. No equivalent Nigerian study exists, which is itself significant. It is not that the problem is absent here. It is that it has not been made visible enough for anyone to study.There is also something particular about how lawyers process their own distress that makes it harder to catch. Lawyers are trained to argue, to build the strongest possible case for a position and dismantle challenges to it. When confronted with the possibility that they are not well, most lawyers will immediately begin making the counter-argument. They will point to their output as evidence of their stability. They will note, accurately, that others in the profession have it harder. They will reframe chronic anxiety as professionalism, insomnia as dedication, emotional flatness as maturity. They will build a persuasive case for their own wellness and, because they are skilled at what they do, they will find it convincing. This is not ordinary self-deception. It is a professional ability deployed in exactly the wrong direction.Knowing this, what do you actually do?The first and least comfortable step is being precise about what you are experiencing. Saying "I am tired" when what you mean is "I have not felt like myself in six months and I am drinking more than I should to take the edge off professional anxiety" is a failure of the precision that lawyers apply to everything else in their work. Name what is actually happening, because until you do, you cannot address it.It also helps to be clear about the difference between occupational pressure and genuine psychological crisis. Pressure is a feature of legal work and it is not going away. Crisis looks different: a persistent low mood that does not lift with rest or time away, meaningful changes in how you sleep or eat, withdrawing from people who matter to you, thoughts of harming yourself. Those things are not a harder version of stress. They require professional attention, and they require it now rather than after the next deal or the end of the court term.Accessing that professional attention is more realistic than many lawyers assume. Organisations like Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative connects people to mental health professionals across the country. Private therapists with experience in high-pressure professional environments are accessible in Lagos and Abuja, and telehealth has made geography considerably less of a barrier than it used to be. Many practitioners offer sliding-scale fees for people where cost is a genuine constraint. The barrier is rarely practical. It is almost always psychological, the same professional logic that said staying silent was the safer choice.For senior lawyers, this section is not only about the people who report to you.Seniority changes the shape of pressure, it does not remove it. Partners worry about business development, client retention, and whether the firm they built can survive a difficult year. Principals in chambers carry their own caseload on top of managing the work of others. Senior in-house counsel navigate legal risk and executive politics simultaneously with nobody above them in the legal function to offload to. And unlike junior lawyers, who at least have peers to suffer alongside, senior lawyers often struggle in genuine isolation. Admitting difficulty to a peer can feel like handing them a competitive advantage. Raising it with a junior is unthinkable. So it simply stays inside, and the years pass.If you reached seniority by enduring things you should not have had to endure, that history deserves honest reflection rather than quiet pride. Surviving a harmful environment and being strengthened by it are not the same thing, and treating them as equivalent is one of the ways that the profession reproduces its own damage across generations. Many senior lawyers are carrying weight from years of practice that they have simply become skilled at not noticing. All the practical steps in this article apply to you as much as to the junior associate you are worried about. The person who bills the most and says the least about how they are doing is not your most reliable colleague. They are your highest risk. And if that description fits you as well, it is worth sitting with that honestly.The NBA has an opportunity here that it has not yet taken seriously. Confidential, properly resourced mental health support specifically for legal professionals is not an unusual ask. Bar associations in other jurisdictions have built this infrastructure. There is no credible argument for why Nigerian lawyers should have less access to it than their counterparts elsewhere, and professional bodies that claim to represent the interests of members cannot indefinitely exclude this one.The law exists to protect people. The lawyers who practise it are not an exception to that. The ones who are most at risk right now are, in many cases, the ones who are most certain that they are doing fine. So, let's end this article by advising all lawyers: 'MAKE SURE TO PROTECT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AT ALL COST.'