The People’s Therapist received an interesting and important letter a few weeks ago from a 3L (I’ve redacted it and altered some details to preserve anonymity):
Mr. Meyerhofer,
I have a question (or perhaps a topic suggestion for a post, as I’m sure many students are wondering about this) about the character and fitness part of the NY bar application.
I have seen a therapist several times over the years for issues relating to depression, eating disorders, and self-injury. On the NY bar application it asks whether you have any psychological issues that might effect your ability to perform as a lawyer. I have absolutely no idea whether I’m required to disclose my psychological treatment history, or if I do, how much of it. Is the determination based on what I personally think, or is it a reasonable person standard?
As I’ve had to go to the ER several times over the years, objectively I could see how someone could interpret that as something that could affect my performance. However, I personally don’t think that it does.
I don’t really know who I could ask about this, as I don’t really want my school administrators to know about my issues. Any information you might have would be much appreciated. Thank you so much for your help!
Sincerely,
“Stumped in Syracuse”
To begin with, here is a passage from a pamphlet, entitled “Are you fit to be a Lawyer,” published by the New York State Lawyer Assistance Trust:
Neither receiving treatment for alcoholism, drug addiction or mental health concerns, nor the status of being a recovering alcoholic or recovering addict are grounds for denial of admission to the bar.
In New York, the focus of the inquiry is on whether chemical abuse or addiction or a mental health condition impairs the applicant’s current ability to practice law.
The bar application asks whether the applicant has “any mental or emotional condition or substance abuse problem that could adversely affect” the “capability to practice law”, and whether the applicant is “currently using any illegal drugs.”
While honesty in disclosing past conduct (for example, arrests and convictions) is essential, disclosure of past treatment is not required. No questions are asked about past treatment. The Committees encourage law students who are experiencing drug, alcohol or other addiction or mental health issues to address those issues as soon as possible, regardless of when the student plans to seek admission to the bar.
The bottom line seems clear – there’s no legal duty for Stumped in Syracuse to disclose his past history of treatment on his bar application unless his mental illness currently impairs his ability to practice law. Under this standard, it would require a severe mental health condition to trigger this duty, and the majority of situations involving mental illness – certainly the ones described in Stumped in Syracuse’s letter – would not require disclosure.
The real issue here – as Stumped suggests – is stigma. Stumped, like any rational person, is afraid someone will find out about his condition and jump to the unfair assumption that he is unfit for his job. That would be a disaster for anyone interested in preserving his professional reputation. For Stumped, the ignorance surrounding mental illness may pose a greater threat than the illness itself.
The first researchers to observe chimpanzees in the wild were left with an idyllic impression of our close ape cousins. They appeared to be a peaceful tribe of vegetarians, who cuddled and groomed and cared for one another in extended family units, sharing fruit and showering their young with affection.
Chimpanzees are gentle, loving and family-oriented within their own territorial mating group. But with chimps from outside that circle, they can turn vicious.
An album of photos was made public in 2008 containing photographs taken by members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz. These pictures are not what you would expect. Dating from 1944, they show laughing, singing, smiling people reveling at Solahütte, an SS recreation home located just outside the death camp.
There’s even a shot of an SS officer lighting the Auschwitz Christmas tree only a few miles from the place where millions were being starved, beaten and gassed.
Freud watched Hitler march into Austria during the Anschluss in 1938, as the powerful Roman Catholic church stood by offering no resistance whatsoever. As Peter Gay describes it:
Another way to ostracize a group is to link them to disease. When Glenn Beck calls Progressivism a “cancer” in America, he implies that Progressives, those people like myself who believe in Progressive causes, are the embodiment of that cancer. He is borrowing a page from Adolf Hitler’s playbook. One of the Fuehrer’s favorite tropes was to compare Jews to tuberculosis bacilli infecting the German nation.
Still another way to justify dehumanizing a group of people is to isolate them because they have a different ethnic background, or physical appearance. This country began as a slave colony, based on the firm notion that people with dark skin could be beaten, abused, tortured, murdered, and bought and sold as chattel because they weren’t really “human” at all – they were more like animals. This is another example of in-group/out-group psychology at work.
The Tea Party movement lends itself to in-group/out-group psychology because it is a homogenous population – an excellent candidate for an in-group. According to a CNN poll, active supporters of the Tea Party, those who have attended a rally or donated money, are much more likely to be wealthy, male, have graduated from college and reside in rural areas that are already GOP and conservative strongholds. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 88% of the Tea Partiers are white. They are also almost entirely Republican. It’s a fair guess that most of them are Christian, too, and probably fundamentalist.
This might explain their obsession with attempting to prove that Barack Obama, the President of the United States, was somehow not born here or is somehow not American.
The latest example of in-group/out-group psychology at work has appeared in the form of threats of violence by radical Right-wingers against Democratic politicians who supported the healthcare bill and voted it into law last week. Black and gay politicians have had nasty names shouted at them. One Democratic congressman was called “baby killer” by his Republican colleague on the floor of the US House of Representatives. There have been death threats and acts of vandalism.
But the Republicans still need to learn a basic lesson in citizenship.
I write a lot about unconscious regression – mostly how to prevent it.
You also need to play. Perhaps that’s what dreams are – the play of the unconscious mind.
Adults do just the opposite. When you play as an adult, you regress back to childhood activities. You might occupy yourself with sports, vegetate with a video game or disappear into a novel or a movie. You might sit on the beach, look at a palm tree and think about the world.
The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote that a man who transcends the conventional thinking of his time “must be accustomed to living on mountain tops.”
But for a few days I’ll let my child take over.
Remember when you were a kid, and you got caught doing something you shouldn’t, and a big cloud formed over your head?
I wrote a column a few weeks back on Prince William and Kate Middleton.
That’s because the British royal family are treated like children. And you want to be treated like a child, too.
William and Kate exist in a similar world. They can’t go swimming without a paparazzo recording each stroke through a telephoto lens.
You never basked in one ten-thousandth the attention – or the adoration – to which William and Kate are subjected on a daily basis.
Your anger is expressed as an aggressive sense of entitlement. You are entitled to photos of them swimming. You are entitled to juicy bits of gossip about their personal lives. Fair’s fair – isn’t it?
No harm in fantasizing about being the royals – the most pampered children of all – so long as it doesn’t become an obsession that occupies your every waking moment. (For most of us that isn’t an issue – it’s just a hobby.)
One of the hard parts of psychotherapy – and the unavoidable realities – is remorse. Inevitably, once you become more aware of who you are, and how you’re living your life…you wish you’d done so sooner.
The second monk laboriously scales the wall and is also soon hidden amid the plants and trees.
The People’s Therapist had fun the other night on the radio, chatting with LA Talk Radio host Terry LeGrand about some common misconceptions that gay and straight people hold about one another.
Watching the most recent Oscars ceremony was a healthy reminder of the most fundamental instinct in human nature – the desire to please.
Perhaps it was her putting it so bluntly – telling the audience that they liked her – that made them flinch, and change their minds, and switch to making fun of her.
I was working this morning with a patient I’ve been seeing for a few months. At the end of our session I suggested he join one of my psychotherapy groups that meet once a week in the evenings.
Myth #3. For a group to work, everyone has to share a common life experience. 
The People's Therapist 