The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge felt his depression as a “grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear.” For Philip Larkin, it was an “irresistible force meeting an immovable object right in your belly.”

Lawyers, though, just call it “billable hours.”

The legal profession is battling closeted-gay-teenager-with-Baptist-parents levels of depression. I was even able to find two studies, one with depression stats for lawyers, the other for prisoners, and, well, let’s just say, if you’re ever in a courtroom with some overzealous prosecutor trying to hit you with 20-to-life for “waiting with intent to loiter,” you could be worse off.

You could be him.

Why are lawyers depressed? What even is depression?

First stop: Kidshealth.org, the definitive medical source for us submorons. The site contains helpful hyperlinks such as “I’ve Never Had My Period," "So What’s This Discharge?,” “Is My Penis Normal?”, and other possible responses to the Family Feud topic, “Questions Your Father Never Wants to Hear.”

So after a small, “personal” site detour — it’s supposed to look like THAT? — I found this intense Kids Health narrative description of depression:

“Lately Lindsay hasn't felt like herself. Her friends have noticed it, too. Kia was surprised when Lindsay turned down her invitation to go to the mall last Saturday (Lindsay could always be counted on to shop!).”

No, my delightful and ambiguously ethnic Kia, Lindsay is not a terrorist or a vampire — she’s just depressed! And possibly a werewolf. Losing interest in things you used to enjoy, such as shopping or being human when the moon is full, is classic depression.

Why lawyers, though? After all, lawyers earn so much money that some are able to eventually pay off their student loans.

Well, here’s an analogy: The law is to the soul what a gravel road screaming by at 70mph is to the unprotected human face. It is evisceratingly dull, ripping off layer after layer of conscious thought, until only the raw, bleeding abyss remains.

Whenever I read another poorly drafted statute, my mind seethes with black, Miltonic verse. Most appellate court prose reads like the scream of tortured angels.

I can still remember the moment I looked down at my notes and saw that I’d just written “reasonable suspicion is more than a hunch but less than a preponderance.” And that it made absolutely no sense.

This realization sent me tumbling down a spiral staircase of epiphanies: that all Law was mere word-wizardry, making sense only in a legal frame of reference separate from reality, that I had spent all semester reifying legal fictions in place of actual justice and that the only probable way to stop the spinning was the application of large amounts of beer to reality.

Even the most liberal-minded among us, after their first encounter with our convoluted Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, would pine for the simple elegance of Hammurabi’s Code — kill a man, give his family a goat, look lustily at a female, be crushed under 3 tons of jagged rock.

But, if law is so depressing, why so many lawyers? One of my law professors gave this defense:

“I think that people who work in the law are probably happier than people who work in the sewers. I mean, you have to consider your options.”

So, to be fair, pre-laws, before writing that admissions essay-cum-suicide note, consider: Do you want to work knee deep in the stinking filth and muck of society, with only rats for colleagues?

Or would you rather work in the sewers?

— Reichert is an Oberlin graduate student in law.