WellnessCast™ hosted by Professor Joe Bankman & Sarah Weinstein

As part of the The Law School Wellness Project, Professor Joe Bankman and I are co-hosting a monthly podcast about wellness and mental health in the legal profession.  The WellnessCast will feature an expert each month in a relevant substantive area.  We welcome your input about topics and look forward to opening conversations that are informative and candid.

One of the goals of the WellnessCast is to reduce the stigma around universal emotions, such as anxiety, self-doubt, worry, fear, unhappiness.  When people become distant from their emotions, they have trouble recognizing them, let alone acknowledging or expressing them.  To reduce this stigma, Professor Bankman and I each share a “hard moment” on an introductory mini-episode of the WellnessCast  and will ask each of our future guests to do the same.  As a lyrical reminder from Leonard Cohen that there is strength in vulnerability, we open each show with his beautiful words from Anthem:  “So, ring the bells that still can ring…forget your perfect offering…there is a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.”

We plan to close our episodes by asking guests to provide a wellness technique they use to thrive in their careers, with the hope that many of you will be inspired to try new ways of maintaining equilibrium in what undoubtedly is a very challenging profession.

We hope you enjoy the introductory mini-episode of the WellnessCast and please tune in next month for our first full-length show featuring Dr. Anna Lembke, Chief of Addiction Medicine at Stanford, and the author of the recent Drug Dealer, MD, a courageous and compelling book about the opioid epidemic.  Our conversation with Dr. Lembke not only provides critically important information about substance misuse and addiction, but happens also to be book-ended by an unusually candid “hard moment” and, as she describes it, a “radical” wellness technique.

If you have feedback, suggestions for WellnessCast topics, or even would like to share your own “hard moments” and wellness techniques, please send us an email.  We are eager to build a community of law professors, law students, and lawyers who are passionate about increasing the possibility for emotional nuance in the legal profession.

Sarah Weinstein