Mental Health Trends & EFAP Utilization in the Legal Profession
Homewood Health analyzes findings from its Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP) for legal professionals from 2019 to 2024. EFAPs are valuable resources supporting employees and their families, increasing quality of life, and improving work-life balance.
At Homewood Health, the percentage of EFAP cases, including anxiety or depression as a primary presenting issue, has been increasing since 2019. Furthermore, there has been an increase in other presenting issues, such as burnout and work stress.
It is essential to analyze the data trends to understand their impact on legal professionals, their lives and those they care about.
Homewood’s EFAP Legal Industry Utilization Trends 2019 to 2024
A key finding from our 2019-2023 analysis suggests that all legal professionals exhibit higher rates of anxiety, stress, and work stress when compared to other EFAP users. Some other notable data points:
- 93% of legal professional EFAP users report meeting their goals.
- 63% of those accessing the EFAP for anxiety exhibit moderate to severe symptoms
- 52% of those accessing the EFAP for depression exhibit moderately severe to severe symptoms.
Conclusion
Overall, we see that legal professionals experience higher rates of anxiety, stress, and work stress when compared to all EFAP cases. These factors may contribute to or be in conjunction with an additional 25% rise in EFAP cases related to marital or relationship issues.
Additional findings include:
- Since 2019, legal professionals have created over 13,000 Homewood EFAP cases.
- There has been a 25% increase in EFAP cases related to marital/relationship issues.
- Work stress was consistently among the top five presenting issues for law professionals and has doubled since 2019 .
Additional Insights from Homewood’s EFAP Trend Analysis
Legal professionals access the EFAP for several challenges, but the data around anxiety and depression is notable. In 2020, nearly 30% of all EFAP cases for legal professionals were for anxiety. Those figures decreased to approximately 23% from 2021 to 2023 but are still above the average for all EFAP users (20%). Regarding depression symptoms and legal professionals, EFAP cases have been rising since 2021, with approximately 11% of all cases being for depression in 2023.