Author: TSA Press

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Ed. note: Brian Cuban wrote this piece for the Texas Bar Journal, and it is being republished here with the permission of the State Bar of Texas.

Lawyers are 3.6 times as likely as non-lawyers to suffer from depression. We have the highest problem drinking rate. It seems like once a month I read about a lawyer dying by suicide (this month has been no exception). We are fourth in that category.

It breaks my heart each time I learn that we have lost another colleague. I may see it on Facebook, Twitter, or a news article. It is rare that suicide is specifically mentioned, but there may be a request in lieu of flowers for a donation to a mental health organization or there may be commentary about the person’s struggle with mental health issues.

We can’t bring ourselves to say the word. We make the donation. We grieve. Maybe tweet out or Facebook post the number to a suicide crisis line. We talk about reaching out. Then we lose another. And another.

In 2005, I stood on the precipice of becoming a tragic statistic as a result of my mental health struggles. That summer, after decades of depression, alcohol, and cocaine addiction, I lost all hope. I looked in the mirror and saw a monster, ugly inside and out. A circus freak who deserved to be locked away in a pitch-black dungeon, shackled to the walls so my “sickness” did not infect anyone else.

In those aphotic moments, it suddenly made perfect sense to me. I would do my family a favor by relieving them of my burden. Self-cull the Cuban herd of the lone black sheep. I did not see a selfish act. I had no concept of “selfish.” Living in the dense fog of suicidal ideation, it was an act of love. A thought process that may seem unfathomable to anyone who has not dwelled in that type of darkness, with seemingly no way to climb out. Days spent in bed, crying and hoping for an end to the pain of loneliness and isolation with no way to articulate it to those who care.

It was a close call. I was lucky to have family and a friend who did not mind their own business. My brothers showed up at my home. They dragged me kicking and screaming to a local psychiatric hospital for what would be my first of two trips over the next two years.

As they pulled me out of bed and forced me to get dressed, evidence of the depth of my problems was strewn about the room. Empty and half-full bottles of booze on the floor. Cocaine lines on the nightstand. Xanax tablets strewn over the imported marble top of my dresser. In addition to the pills, I was chugging whiskey as a sleep aid to come down from the cocaine high — a difficult if not impossible way to engage in the competent practice of law. As we walked out the door, I heard my younger brother, Jeff, mention addiction and drinking issues. My older, Mark, focused on depression. They were both right.

The drive to the hospital consisted of me screaming at my brothers to take me back home and leave me alone. I wanted the people who loved me most in the world out of my life. They were trying to save me.

As we walked through the doors of the psychiatric facility, it dawned on me that there was going to be an attempt to have me committed. I was not going to let that happen. I put my law degree to use. I made it clear, sitting with the attending psychiatric physician, that I was not a danger to myself or others. I convinced him that I had no intention of harming myself. To the chagrin of my brothers, they could not keep me there. When we returned to my house, they took my car keys and demanded that I not leave for two weeks so I could sober up and “get my head on straight.” I recall thinking that was fine because my cocaine dealer made house calls. My family was no different than any other. They struggled to understand my problems and were learning about addiction and major depression in the moment, while also trying to save my life.

Tough lessons under any circumstances.

It would take one more trip to that hospital after a two-day drug-and-alcohol-induced blackout before I would begin my long-term recovery journey. I often reflect back on those brutal moments and wonder why I am still here. There was clearly a timing factor. People did not mind their own business at the right moment for intervention to occur before I completed the act of suicide.

Tragically, that is not always the case. Whether its depression, addiction, or other mental health variables, we can’t be there every moment and those tragic and life-changing/ending thoughts can come quickly and without warning.

The good news is that we all have the ability to play a significant role in changing the course of a life by simply doing what my friend and brothers did. By stepping outside of our comfort zone. By not minding our own business. We can look within ourselves and pledge to pay attention. To lend an ear. Here is a simple method I use to engage when I suspect someone is struggling even if I have no idea what the issue may be.

Me: “(First Name), you looked stressed today, everything OK? Anything I can do to help?”

Possible response: “Appreciate it, I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

Don’t walk away! Repeat the message.

Me: “Glad to hear that, but I want you to know that if you want to talk, I am a good ear.” (or something like that)

What you have done is provide a message that can prompt someone into thinking about getting help even if he or she is not ready at that moment, and with the quick repeat message, you have reinforced it and provided a window for the person to change his or her mind. In those few seconds, people do change their minds. The tap on the shoulder comes as you walk away. Or maybe you get a call or text later in the day.

Possible response: “Now that you mention it, can we talk?”

Regardless of the response, you have now become a vital cog in positive mental health messaging. No accusations.  No judgment. Just empathy and support.

The person may not be ready to talk about it or not want to talk about it with you. They may reach out to someone they have a comfort level with. It doesn’t matter. The messaging is as important as the response. The knowledge that people do care is implanted and reinforced. I had a lawyer tell me that he was not ready when I stepped out of my comfort zone, but he never forgot that I cared and after a cumulation of people not minding their own business, he sought help for both his depression and problem drinking.

Each time we don’t mind our own business, it could be that one moment that changes the course of someone’s life. It also could be one of a series of touchpoints that eventually gets that person to seek help.

Not minding your own business will not save everyone. As long as there is human suffering, there will be tragedy. We cannot be there every moment of the day when someone is struggling, and I know from experience that the thoughts and desire to act can come on fast without warning to anyone else. Not minding your own business, however, may be the one moment that you need to save just one person by interrupting a terrible, dark process. Take that chance. Be uncomfortable. Reach out. Interrupt.

Pledge to ask someone how he or she is doing and let him or her know you are there for an ear. When you see how easy it is, think about doing it again and again. It costs nothing but some time. Those few seconds can change the course of a life. The benefits can last a lifetime.

Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

We Use A Lot Of Concrete

I spent this Labor Day at one of my favorite museums. You really can’t help but learn something useful every time you go there. I’d gone in already having a pretty good idea as to what I’d be writing about this week, and as luck would have it, stumbled upon a little something that helped me along in my research.

Human beings need a lot of resources to survive, and especially to survive in style with iPhones and whatnot. The most-consumed material on earth is probably not a surprise to you. It’s water. But the second most-consumed material isn’t as obvious: reinforced concrete.

Each year, we use three metric tons of the stuff for every person on earth. That’s a lot of concrete. Reinforced concrete is the world’s most common building material, and ever since French gardener Joseph Monier came up with the stuff in 1867, the artificial environment we construct for ourselves has never been the same. Thanks for the helpful background info, Science Museum!

Concrete Is Awful For The Earth, But What If You Could Make It Out Of Ganja?

While reinforced concrete has proven terribly useful over the last century-and-a-half, it’s also proven terribly, well, terrible in terms of its environmental consequences. Cement makers can take credit for about seven percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The limestone kilns required to produce cement, and therefore to produce concrete, are not exactly ecofriendly. The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process of making cement weighs half as much as the cement produced, according to the European Cement Association.

Now, bear with me here, because a possible solution to this problem at first sounds like a half-baked idea that came from your fully-baked friends: what if we just all built our houses out of weed?

Thanks to some wonderful reporting from Bloomberg, we now know that this is sort of already a thing. It is not actually marijuana that is being used as a building material, of course, but rather marijuana’s industrious (and non-psychoactive) cousin, hemp.

Hemp is a pretty useful plant. In addition to its many other applications, hemp has been used as a building material since the days of the Roman Empire, when engineers mixed its strong fibers into the mortar they used to hold up bridges, many of which stand to this day. In newer structures, we use modern hempcrete, a combination of the inner woody core of the hemp plant and a lime-based or clay-based binder. Like its reinforced concrete antecedent, hempcrete was also developed in France.

Fully cured hempcrete weighs only about a seventh or an eighth of the weight of concrete. Compared to their concrete counterparts, hempcrete buildings have better temperature regulation, ventilation, and fire resistance. Maybe best of all, hempcrete is carbon negative. Growing hemp absorbs CO₂, and the plant continues to soak up carbon as it’s mixed with lime or clay. According to Canadian builder Just BioFiber, each cubic meter of its hemp-based structural material entraps 287 pounds of carbon dioxide, which is more CO₂ than is emitted during production.

Maybe The U.S. Should Get Over Itself And Stop Ceding The Hemp Market To Europe And Canada

Hempcrete is not a replacement for concrete in all circumstances. It does not have the same load-bearing capabilities of traditional concrete. Still, in Europe, buildings as high as 10 stories have been built using hempcrete.

Hemp’s proven utility abroad is finally winning it some fans again in North America. The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology reported that Canadian hemp sales reached $140 million last year, and could hit $1 billion within five years. In the United States, over the last half-century growing hemp has been largely illegal because of its resemblance to marijuana. However, the 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the controlled substances act and legalized its cultivation under certain circumstances. A number of states have since taken steps to ramp up production, although at this point it’s still a bit of a legal nightmare to actually get from a hemp seed to a building component in the U.S. Only a few dozen homes nationwide contain hemp as a building material.

Hempcrete is a hearty, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and profitable building material that can be produced in close proximity to the buildings it is actually used to construct. Sounds like a good way to help out the struggling farm economy, and maybe even gin up some work for the legal industry in unentangling over half a century of misguided regulation.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

According to Student Loan Hero’s 20 Best Law Schools for Avoiding Six-Figure Student Debt, which law school comes in at the top spot?

Hint: The average law school debt at graduation at this school is only $58,113, but it comes with a significant caveat.

See the answer on the next page.