Requiring Law Schools to Provide Clinical Counseling Services Forum

[izzybee]

I don't know about others, but our law school has NO clinical counseling services or any mental health support.

If anyone wishes, we met with the ABA President and then created this petition demanding he require law schools to provide these services.

https://www.change.org/p/bob-carlson-re ... g-services

Please sign if you feel so inclined and share anything else you wish to, as we have access to him!!

[The Lsat Airbender]

Not a fan of anything that would inflate the cost of law school even further. Mental-health care should be expanded in the US but it makes so much more sense for individuals and/or the government to take the lead rather than random unrelated institutions like law schools.

College is a bit different, since colleges are widely expected to act as parents, but anyone capable of attending law school should also be capable of hiring their own therapist. Cost is an issue, but I don't see how backdooring that cost through one's tuition and fees helps.

[nixy]

Don't most law schools require students either to get health insurance through the school or prove they have comparable coverage? Mental health treatment should be available through that insurance, right?

[cavalier1138]

Don't most law schools require students either to get health insurance through the school or prove they have comparable coverage? Mental health treatment should be available through that insurance, right?

This.

And it's an issue for the university, not the law school.

[Bingo_Bongo]

I'm strongly opposed to this. Is there a counter petition I can sign?

Why the heck would it be your law school's duty to provide you with a therapist?

If you're in law school, and seeking out a career where you're going to be fiduciary in charge of helping other, less capable, people, you should be capable of taking care of yourself enough to seek out and hire your own freaking therapist. That's like the absolute bare minimum of life skills you should have if you're seeking a bar license.

You're an adult. The law school isn't your parent. I'm sick of the infantization of younger Millennials and Generation Z. You guys are giving older Millennials, like myself, a bad name. At a certain point it stops becoming everyone else's job to take care of you.

Sorry about the rant, but it just seems like 21 is the new 14 or something. Maybe I'm just getting older, but college students, and even law students, are increasingly seeming way younger socially and mentally than when I was in law school, which really wasn't that long ago.

[nixy]

I mean, the petition definitely has a point that lawyers are entering a particularly/uniquely stressful kind of profession, and preparing students for profession-specific stressors isn’t a bad idea at all. Access to a therapist familiar with the challenges of stressful professional programs would be helpful. Personally I’d see this as something the university’s student health services should make available for all grad students more than the law school specifically, though. The law school offering wellness programs and info about resources makes more sense to me than having a therapist actually on staff (Though I’m not super concerned about the cost - I don’t think tuition actually has much of any relation to how much it costs to educate students).

[cavalier1138]

Another issue here is that not every therapist is a good match for every potential client. Even when you weed out the bad therapists (and there are plenty), some clients respond better to different personality types. Therapy is highly individualized; it makes way more sense to let students take care of things like this for themselves.

[Wild Card]

Law school already costs 350,000. I don't want to pay for a bunch of charlatans to babysit you. If you have real problems, see a professional.