As law students, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. Pressure to do well, pressure to work hard and pressure to look good doing it. And naturally, we envy those who manage to actually achieve this. In law school, Jerome Doraisamy was one of those envied few: studying-full time, working part-time as a paralegal, putting in a full-time job’s worth of hours with his law school’s law students’ society. In his new book, The Wellness Doctrines, Jerome discusses his personal experiences and his law school journey and asks us to consider what toll this kind of pressure takes on each of us.
“Law school can be, and is, such a difficult and competitive environment and this was a contributing factor in myself of personal and professional self-worth,” said Jerome.
“Some of it was self-inflicted, of course; but the context in which I was existing certainly didn’t help much either. The tendency to compare myself to friends and classmates, with regards to marks for assignments or exams and then with summer clerkships and graduate roles, was something that probably affected me as well.”
For Jerome, all of this pressure, both internal and external, built to a critical point and in his book The Wellness Doctrines, Jerome begins with his story. The story of how at a New Years’ Eve music festival, it all came down to one thing: he wasn’t happy.
And while many of us are comfortable with saying the same, few of us are quick to use the D-word: depression.
“I wish I had known, especially in time where I can tell in hindsight that my health and wellbeing were slipping, that my worth as a person was in no way, shape or form determined by how successful I was in law school, how much I achieved, or what job I ended up in,” said Jerome.
It’s for this reason that Jerome has written The Wellness Doctrines, a practical self-help guide for people in and entering a profession with alarmingly high rates of anxiety and depression.
“On a personal level, it has been and continues to be an attempt to ensure that no law student or lawyer ever has to experience what I experienced. The debilitating, crippling nature of depression, that can and does manifest partly as a result of being a member of the legal profession, is an illness that I wouldn’t wish upon anybody.”
The Wellness Doctrines will be released on the 1st of October 2015. To find out more and get yourself a copy, click here.
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