‘It’s the stigma that stops people talking and that same stigma prevents anyone else from learning.’
In 2011, then Speechly Bircham partner Richard Martin suffered a major panic attack followed by a breakdown and almost two years of therapy. Having left City law, Martin now works for workplace and HR consultancy Byrne Dean, advising on mental health issues. For him, the stigma around mental health in the City has prevented people speaking out.
I wasn’t aware of the warning signs. I went on a family holiday in 2011 and on the way back, just south of Paris, I had a massive panic attack. I had to get out of the car and somehow I decided the sensible thing to do was walk across four lanes of French motorway traffic. Eventually I was accosted by a French toll booth assistant, asking: ‘What are you doing?’ I had to confess I had very little idea.
I was probably in a state of high anxiety for several years. With a combination of different factors, it’s difficult to say precisely where the stress is coming from. My wife says looking back it was like living on the slopes of a volcano. You kind of know something is happening but you hope it won’t erupt. Those warning signs – increasing irritability, constantly feeling stressed, never sitting down or spending any time for myself.
I sat on the management committee and ran the employment team at Speechly Bircham. I had more and more clients coming to me for legal advice about workplace problems, but who clearly weren’t very well. I was becoming increasingly aware of the impact of work on illness and mental health, without really focusing on myself at all.
I stayed at home for the first couple of weeks. I went to see my GP the day after I got home from France and he quickly diagnosed an anxiety problem. Things deteriorated over the next few weeks and I found it increasingly hard to function.
When you have never experienced problems like this before you have no benchmark, nothing to gauge yourself against. I was becoming increasingly hard to live with and it was becoming increasingly hard for me to live in the world. My psychiatrist suggested hospitalisation. I asked him if I was the sort of person who goes to hospital. I didn’t know if people like me were ill enough. But he said, yes, hospital is full of people like you.
It was only the start of my journey. I spent a couple of years off work and in therapy. By April 2013 I came to the view that if going back to work meant working in a law firm again then it would not be possible, so I had to resign from my post before I would be able to think about a new direction.
I did a lot of personal therapy, and undertook studies in counselling and psychotherapy. How we think and our sense of wellbeing is fundamental to what happens in workplaces, yet hardly anybody was paying attention to this stuff. I started talking to people about it and was quickly put in touch with Byrne Dean where I work now. We do huge amounts of work around workplace culture.
We hadn’t focused on mental health in its own right. I did training to become a mental health first aid trainer – all workplaces have physical first aiders, but you are far more likely to come across someone with suicidal thoughts, for example, than you are to come across someone having a heart attack. We train first aiders and deliver a whole range of shorter training sessions focused on mental health. Inevitably, given my background, we do a lot of work with law firms.
I don’t think anyone at Speechly Bircham saw the warning signs. I certainly didn’t. I don’t think any of us knew that we should be looking, let alone what we should be looking for. The most common reaction from colleagues was that of all the people around I was the last one anyone would have thought would be having mental health problems.
In the City and elsewhere there will have been partners and people at all levels in law firms who have had significant mental health issues, but until now this has never been talked about. It’s the stigma that stops people talking and that same stigma prevents anyone else from learning. Thankfully things are changing. A number of firms have been more active in the last few years. Many are still at the starting point of their journey, but an increasing number are recognising the need to take this seriously and for the firm to take a lead.