Notwithstanding increased awareness of well-being issues among lawyers, relatively scant attention has been paid to the prevalence of vicarious trauma-induced mental health issues among law students. As clinical faculty, we empower students to become agents of change, but how well do we protect them from the potentially harmful personal consequences of safeguarding the rights and interests of our clients? Do we set unfair expectations of how they should react (or not react) in particular ways to trauma they witness, and, in turn, do more than hinder their ability to engage in ethical and effective lawyering? How well do we appreciate that our students, by virtue of their clinical experience, are at risk of developing mental health issues with consequences far beyond the clinical setting?
This session will explore not only how to identify individual circumstances that may cause a student to experience secondary trauma, but also how systemic and structural issues can contribute to it. We’ll explore viewing such issues from different vantage points: (1) the institutional, structural perspective; (2) the student perspective; and (3) the client perspective. We’ll further discuss how to incorporate teaching about trauma-informed lawyering and how we can move beyond the mere teaching of this topic to practices that actively guard against ourselves becoming part of the compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma cycle. Further, we will provide tools to assist clinical faculty in diagnosing barriers at each level to confronting persistent mental health challenges.
We will ask the audience to engage with hypothetical scenarios of students and faculty experiencing secondary trauma and systemic issues contributing to it. Small groups will discuss what structural interventions may reduce the compassion fatigue in each scenario. Participants will share and help create a bank of best practices aimed at reducing the incidence of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue nationwide.