Law profs design course to combat student anxiety
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A Stanford law professor pursuing a doctorate in psychology is putting his knowledge to use in a pilot project to promote emotional health among law students.
Tax policy scholar Joseph Bankman believes cognitive behavioral therapy can help students cope with the stresses of law school. He collaborated with Stanford law professor Barbara Fried and Yale law professor Ian Ayres to design a two-hour course for 1Ls using the technique, Stanford Lawyer reports in a story reprinted by Stanford News.
In the first hour, the professor asks the students to imagine a situation likely to provoke anxiety, such as flubbing the answer when called on in class. The students are then asked to record their likely reactions.
“For instance,” Bankman told Stanford Lawyer, “a student might think, ‘I don’t belong in law school,’ or, ‘Everyone is going to think I’m an idiot.’ The behavioral response, in turn, might be, ‘I’m not going to speak again unless forced to,’ or, ‘I’m going to go out and get drunk.’ “
The students are then assigned to read texts about anxiety and depression. The next class, the professor passes out a list of the reactions recorded by students in the first class, without identifying information. The professor then leads a discussion of how to deal with such negative thoughts and behaviors.
The students are encouraged to use one of the coping techniques before the end of the quarter and to report whether it helped with their anxiety.
Fried has offered the course in her first-year contracts class, while Ayres offered it to 1Ls at Yale. The student response was “overwhelmingly positive,” the story says.
