A recent, broad study of lawyer mental health contains a pair of numbers about lawyer alcohol use that deserve more attention than they have received. In the September 2026 ABA and Krill Strategies study of roughly 37,000 lawyers, 41.8 percent screened positive for risky drinking, yet only 2.3 percent reported a current alcohol use disorder diagnosis. Most commentary has treated the study as a general portrait of distress, but this gap is its most revealing finding, because it measures not how much lawyers drink but how little of it they are willing to recognize. This article argues that the distance between those two figures is not an information problem, since lawyers read warning signs as well as anyone, but a defensive achievement, produced by the same verbal and analytical skills that make lawyers effective advocates. Understanding that distinction matters, because a profession that cannot see its own drinking will not treat it, and no wellness program can reach a problem that its own members decline to name.
The authors, Patrick Krill and Justin Anker, used the AUDIT-C screening instrument and found that 26.3 percent of lawyers met the higher cutoff applied in the 2016 ABA and Hazelden Betty Ford study, roughly ten percentage points lower than a decade ago. That decline is real progress, yet the study’s executive summary emphasizes that lawyers still drink hazardously at rates well above typical adult and primary-care benchmarks. Meanwhile, the respondents described a profession in which drinking and stress travel together: 20.5 percent reported that their alcohol or other drug use had increased because of the stress of legal practice, and 31 percent had encountered a legal professional in the past twelve months whose well-being raised concerns about fitness to practice. The researchers offer two explanations for the diagnostic gap: a fear that acknowledging a problem could jeopardize a professional license, and a professional culture that normalizes heavy drinking and so reduces the chance that anyone recognizes their own use as problematic. The help-seeking data support the first explanation, since 53.3 percent of respondents feared that seeking help would not remain confidential and 49.2 percent feared harm to their reputation, even though 75.2 percent knew that lawyer assistance programs exist, which suggests that awareness of help is not the obstacle.
Psychodynamic theory offers a precise account of how this gap forms. Rationalization and intellectualization are defense mechanisms in which an uncomfortable behavior is explained away in plausible, logical terms, and few professionals are better trained to construct plausible, logical terms than lawyers. When a drink reliably quiets the physiological arousal of an adversarial workday, it is negatively reinforced, and the lawyer who benefits from that relief has every incentive to build an explanation that keeps it intact, such as the client dinner, the difficult week, or the comparison to colleagues who drink more. Psychodynamic therapy addresses the pattern directly by examining the function the drinking serves and the argument the lawyer has constructed to protect it, rather than debating the number of drinks consumed, a debate that a skilled cross-examiner of the self will always win. Buddhist psychology complements that work through mindfulness-based relapse prevention, which teaches the lawyer to notice craving as a passing bodily event, to observe the urge without obeying or suppressing it, and thereby to see directly what the drink is being asked to do. The two approaches ask different questions, since one examines why the explanation exists and the other observes what happens when no explanation is offered, and a lawyer who has defeated every argument against drinking may find that watching a craving rise and fall is the first evidence that cannot be argued with.
For the lawyer reading these figures, the useful question is not whether a diagnosis applies but whether the drinking has begun to do a job. Notice whether alcohol is how the day ends, how a difficult hearing is processed, or how sleep arrives, and notice how quickly an explanation appears when the question is raised, because the speed of the rationalization is itself informative. A pattern is not a diagnosis, and recognizing one requires no label, only a willingness to examine it with someone trained to do so, ideally someone who understands the licensure pressures lawyers face. The confidentiality concern the study documents is reasonable, which is why it is worth asking any prospective clinician, at the first contact, exactly how confidentiality is handled. AttorneyTherapists.com maintains a directory of clinicians who work with attorneys.
