With the overall suicide rate of lawyers and law students being higher than most other occupations, a new club at the St. Thomas School of Law offers help by spreading awareness, providing information and opening a dialogue to talk about mental, physical and chemical health.
The Pursuit of Happiness club is one of the few law-school-based, student-run organizations in the nation that focuses on mental health.
“There’s new leadership this year, and I really feel like we’re doing some great things,” said Nicole Raebel, one of the club’s co-presidents and second-year student at the St. Thomas School of Law.
In an environment where the grades are curved, the homework load is heavy and everyone is competing, law students have many reasons to be stressed out. Second-year School of Law student Brittany Dingman, who is the other co-president of the club, knows this all too well.
“It’s a lot of of pressure,” Dingman said. “And that’s one of the reasons we were so passionate about getting involved in the organization, because we know how stressful it is. We want to help people.”
One of the ways the Pursuit of Happiness club tries to help law students is through opening conversations about mental health.
“There’s a mental stigma to talk about how (school) gives you this crazy anxiety,” Raebel said. “Everyone wants to seem okay because it is so competitive.”
Dingman and Raebel often set up a table for the club in order to dispense resources, spread information and open a dialogue. The club also hosts events like the Barista Review where students can drink coffee at a cafe and talk about what’s stressing them out.
“The law school has this event called a Bar Review, where basically you go to a bar with classmates, you have free happy hour and stuff like that,” Dingman said. “But with Pursuit of Happiness, we’re concerned with also having events that don’t involve alcohol.”
The club also organizes a mental health week in the spring semester, as well as a lunch event during orientation week in August. According to Raebel, it’s very rare that a student organization is able to host an event during orientation week.
“When we went to orientation two years ago, it was just never spoken about. So to a lot of us, the amount of work, what was expected of us, the stress level, the anxiety and not having those connections, yet being new to the school, came as a shock,” Dingman said. “So we felt there was a need to have a lunch program dedicated to talking about how things are different.”
Now that the club is making more of a name for itself at St. Thomas, both Dingman and Raebel hope to expand it’s capabilities outside of the law school to the business school, other graduate programs and the undergraduate school in St. Paul.
“We value the mission. We’re interested in becoming leaders in mental, physical and emotional health on campus,” Raebel said. “We want them to know that we’re there for them; they can talk to us.”
In the end, the Pursuit of Happiness club’s main goal centers around communication.
“We’re all adults; we should be able to talk about mental health, especially with the law field having higher rates of everything,” Dingman said. “It’s important to let people know that it’s okay … if you’re struggling. Everyone struggles, it’s law school.”
Maya Shelton-Davies can be reached at shel1181@stthomas.edu.