Advanced Directive for Mental Health

Inside Higher Ed reports on research into an "advanced directive for mental health" that may help schools better deal with students who later experience an episode of a pre-existing mental illness.

I think this would be especially help in the law school setting and especially now and in the near future. Millennials are an intensely pressured generation. People simply cannot maintain the kind of schedules and performance levels that Millennials have maintained their entire lives without eventually suffering some kind of ill effects. For some, it may be as simple as a decline in performance. But for others, it can be the complete inability to cope with a mental illness that has previously been managed effectively with talk therapy and/or medication. When that happens, it would be helpful to have an advanced directive that tells the law school community how best to respond to this student. In twelve years of teaching, I've only had a few students behave really, really inappropriately. In every single case, it was a student who had a psychiatric diagnosis and whose stress level had finally outrun the student's ability to cope with the illness with the previously-prescribed regimen. After an adjustment of medication or therapy, each student was able to continue law school and graduate without further incident.

This could be a tremendous benefit also for lawyers to have an advanced directive on file with the State Bar (I'll leave the downsides to such an idea to others who are better versed in mental health law and privacy, but I do see the red flags). Finally, we would have some use for all that information that the Board of Law Examiners requires people to disclose before they become licensed to practice law. It's one thing to just know that a lawyer has a history of bipolar disorder that was successfully managed at the time of the Bar application; it's another thing entirely to know what to do if that lawyer starts to endanger clients because something about the illness or treatment changes.

I wonder what we might be able to prevent in law school and law practice with that kind of information.