Have You Considered Seeing a Therapist?

Being a juror is tough. You wake up early to go the courthouse only to be told to wait for hours. You don’t have to go to work, but you do have to sit in a room and talk to people you’ve never met before and will probably never talk to every again until you can reach some kind of agreement. You have to sit and listen to other people talk. And the other people will talk a lot, possibly about things you don’t know anything about and never wanted to learn anything about. Sometimes it will feel like everyone gets to talk but you, especially if it’s a high profile case. And since high profile cases tend to involve sensational facts, you will probably want to talk, if only to get things off your chest.

We live in a time with increasing awareness about mental health issues. Significantly, there has been a push for people to seek professionalhelp instead of relying simply on friends and family, who may be good listeners but aren’t exactly trained to handle other people’s mental health problems. For one thing, friends and family don’t come with a professional duty not to tell anyone else about what you’ve told them.

But the classic jury instruction tells juror not to discuss the case with anyone, even each other, until all the evidence has been presented. In a world where more and more people are diagnosed with mental health issues, such an instruction may border on cruel and may have a negative impact on the juror’s performance if the case becomes a source of stress that they cannot get help dealing with. Does the instruction come with an exception for therapists? Even as people work to destigmatize seeing a therapist, most people would probably still balk at the idea of raising their hand and asking the judge if they can at least talk to their therapist about the case.

And that’s just people who walk into the jury box with a therapist. Think about the people who leave the jury box needing a therapist. Extremely long cases and cases that involve shocking facts, such as homicide or rape cases, certainly have an impact on jurors. Arguably, you wouldn’t want a jury that wasn’t affected, on some level, by the facts of such cases. But few states offer any sort of counseling. Those that do tend to only have spottycoverage, with budgetary concerns keeping the programs small.

If courts aren’t sure how to approach the issue of jurors’ mental health, it’s a symptom of a larger societal problem. On the back end is the fact that therapy costs money. Knowing that jurors may leave the courtroom in need of professional help does not mean that the court has the resources to give them that hope. On the front end is the fact that having a therapist is still not considered normal and therefore isn’t prepared for, much like how, once upon a time, many restaurants did not have options for vegetarians or the lactose intolerant.