By David S. D’Amato
I’ve spent much of my career in the legal industry as a lawyer and a law firm business administrator. I don’t have the demographic profile of a typical American lawyer or even a typical BigLaw business director. My parents, Italian Americans from Greater Boston (one of whom is a second-generation American) did not graduate from college, and no one in their families went to law school or became a lawyer.
I graduated from law school in 2010, during one of the worst job markets of the past several decades—in the wake of a financial crisis that gave rise to widespread unemployment and wage stagnation. I was always taught to put my nose to the grindstone, to never complain, to eagerly volunteer for more work—whether that meant staying at the office late or working on weekends. “You’re lucky to have the work” was the dominant refrain, and we find that sentiment returning today—in another employer’s market.
When I began my career as a lawyer, I always wanted to learn more and take on more responsibility—the more that I did and produced, the more like a real, worthwhile human being I felt—at least at first. I would do anything to make my family proud. But I slowly became more unmoored, isolated from family, friends and my values. My whole personality was buried under inauthentic, fawning people-pleasing, saying yes regardless of the mental and emotional costs, adding projects and hours in the hope that it would make me feel like I was accepted and belonged.
When you’ve been masking with all your might since you were a small child, you end up feeling incredibly lost, alone, alienated and afraid, unable to develop a clear picture of who you are. You constantly ask yourself whether you really know anything about your personality and values, creating a constant, unbearable sense of dread and extreme dysphoria.
But this kind of strenuous masking is a requirement for success in the corporate world if you are neurodivergent or struggle with mental illness. The expectation to be an extrovert and deliver consistent high performance created a sense of unrelenting feeling of being overwhelmed.
My mental health issues come with an acute sensitivity to rejection, but ironically, this has led to personal and professional habits that have made rejection seem almost inevitable: among them paralyzing perfectionism and rumination. Though it would take years and an almost deadly breakdown to recognize it, I was experiencing acute, life-threatening burnout.
Over the years of acute mental illness, my day-to-day life got darker and scarier. I tried to quell what became hourly panic attacks with various forms of self-medication. As the years passed, I spoke extensively with some of the country’s top therapists and psychiatrists. No one knew quite how to diagnose me or which pills to give me. Commonly prescribed drug therapies and treatment programs failed to help, and they have often made my symptoms worse.
After years, I finally reached a point of physical and psychological exhaustion that made suicide feel like a good (or better) option. I began to have very persistent, frightening thoughts about how nice it would be to simply not exist. In my mind, nothingness looked like rest from constant pain and anxiety and exhaustion, like sleep and perfect, endless peace.
On Sept. 14, 2023, after years of quiet struggle, I tried to take my life in a hotel room in Chicago. The idea of going to sleep and never waking up seemed like my best bet, like the only chance I had left for any relief, the only way to be able to rest my mind, my body and my heart. I was disappointed to wake up in the hospital.
We remain in the earliest days of understanding mental illness, a preparadigmatic stage in which the results of studies often are not replicable, and we find a lack of consensus among the various available models used to explain it.
We hear a lot these days about a mental health crisis, but no one really knows what that means; so much of the information that we would have to know lives on the other side of our collective unwillingness to change the social and institutional structures that are hurting us. It lives in unshared stories and the pain that we hide to try to save face.
Even after having lived with major mental health issues, I can’t shake my outmoded ways of thinking about them and the people they afflict—myself included. We’re all judging people with mental health issues because we’ve been trained to and because we think that tough, capable, high-achieving people are supposed to power through. More than that, we think that highly credentialed professionals are simply not the kinds of people who have mental health issues in the first place.
Top firms attract smart, talented and driven people who personify what has come to be known as hustle culture. We are taught to measure our self-worth in degrees, credentials, job titles, promotions and—perhaps more than anything else—money and status. For many of us, there is no shame worse than looking weak to our high-achieving, high-earning peers. Our culture is one of toxic productivity, fixated on endless growth.
This fact has become more and more conspicuous as so many of our hardest workers and highest earners seem to be the most impoverished among us in terms of free time and peace. Burnout and overwork have now become a crisis and an epidemic, responsible for millions of deaths every year. Deep feelings of isolation and purposelessness seem to be a feature of the prevailing social and economic paradigm, rather than a bug. “Hopelessness is at epidemic levels,” with a growing number of Americans experiencing chronic depression and despair.
Credentialed “knowledge workers” like nothing more than to flex on social media, cultivating the appearance of a person who really cares and would help. But when push comes to shove, stigma remains the dominant and overriding fact and cultural mode, present in every conversation about mental health generally and suicide in particular.
Our glorification of powering through challenges without taking time to recover or assess underlying issues is a maladaptive response to chronic stress and exhaustion. It perpetuates the worst aspects of hustle culture by ignoring the structural and systemic factors that have led us here, isolating people by making us think that everything comes down to our choices.
I’ve had several people, including colleagues, friends and family members, suggest or state outright that mental health issues are not a real disability or even a genuine health issue—at least not as real as physical health issues—notwithstanding the fact that we have known for decades that mental health issues have a real and tangible impact on physical health, and that the brain is indeed an organ and part of the body.
After my suicide attempt, the first thing I heard from those closest to me was: “So when are you getting back in the saddle?” and “I know you can do better—just try harder!” One of my closest family members even encouraged me to end my life. Only my productivity mattered.
Much of the resilience discourse and the practices that we have adopted in the corporate world have become completely toxic. Our culture teaches us that if one is struggling with mental health issues, they are essentially weak and just have to try harder. The prevailing message remains: No one is looking. It’s your responsibility to keep pushing.
David S. D’Amato is an attorney, a businessman and an author of popular and scholarly articles. His writing has appeared in the Hill, Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, the Washington Examiner and many other publications, and his work has been cited by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, among others.
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