Commissioned by the Canadian Judicial Council, the study on judges’ mental health is the first of its kind
A new study on the mental well-being of 794 federally-appointed judges in Canada found that nearly half are experiencing burnout symptoms, but still have overall better mental health than lawyers across the country.
According to the report published Thursday by the Canadian Judicial Council in collaboration with researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke, 17.4 percent of the judges who participated in the researchers’ survey reported symptoms of anxiety – a figure that more than doubled for lawyers.
Twenty-eight percent of judges, meanwhile, said they experience psychological distress, compared to 57 percent of lawyers; 10.5 percent of judges said they had depressive symptoms, while 28.1 percent of lawyers reported the same.
Reflecting on the two demographics on Thursday, Associate Chief Justice Kenneth Nielsen of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta, who chairs a CJC working group on judges’ health and well-being, said he could only speculate as to why they fared differently with respect to mental health. However, he said one clue might be found in another set of findings in the CJC report: the high level of job satisfaction among judges.
The report found that 68.7 percent of the nearly 800 participating judges – who represented 65 percent of Canada’s federally appointed judges at the time the survey was conducted in 2025 – reported a high level of meaning in their work. This was reported more frequently among newly-appointed and appellate judges than among judges who had served for a decade or longer or worked in a trial court.
“Judges are pretty happy with their position in society and the contributions that they make,” Nielsen told Canadian Lawyer. “I practised law for 30 years, and it’s a tough way to make a living.”
According to Nathalie Cadieux, the Université de Sherbrooke professor who led the CJC survey, the figures about lawyers come from a previous survey she helmed on the mental health of lawyers, Quebec notaries, Ontario paralegals, and articling students. That study had been conducted in collaboration with the Canadian Bar Association, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, and law societies across the country.
Later, Cadieux led another study of young lawyers in Quebec; during the same period, the CJC asked Cadieux’s team to produce the report on the judiciary’s mental health and well-being, the first of its kind for federally-appointed judges in Canada.
“It was very, very incredible to have on my screens every day during the last two years, on the one side… the young lawyer in the province of Quebec, and on the other screen, the judges in Canada,” Cadieux says.
“We felt it was important to study this topic because judges play an essential role in the justice system,” she says of the CJC report. “Their own working conditions and well-being haven’t really been examined empirically in Canada, and recognizing these challenges is not about undermining confidence in the judiciary. It’s about training the justice system by ensuring that those who carry such important responsibilities can do so in a healthy, sustainable, and supportive way.”
The CJC report identified several factors that led judges to feel overworked. These include a lack of human resources in courts, a high number of sitting days, the pressure of adjudicating cases involving self-represented litigants, and court filings with a high volume of evidence and documents, some of which are irrelevant.
Nearly half of judges (49.9 percent) also reported a low sense of safety. The study noted that participating judges reported significant disparities in the security measures across different courts and provinces.
The study found that 52 percent of surveyed judges who reported being burnt out thought about retiring early at least once a month. The average age of the survey’s participants was 60.
Cadieux’s team introduced several recommendations to address the participants’ work overload, including an overhaul of how sitting days are distributed, increasing the number of court administrative staff, providing more support to self-represented litigants, and adjusting responsibilities based on a judge’s age.
Focusing on this last recommendation, Cadieux noted that, in general, judges make up an aging workforce. “The function of judges [involves] a lot of duties, a lot of responsibility, with long work hours and a very high emotional load,” she says.
“Beyond their legal expertise, they contribute to the stability of the courts and the transfer of institutional knowledge and mentoring of more recently appointed judges,” she adds. “So it’s very important to maintain them in their function. But for this, to be realistic, we have to adapt the job.”
Nielsen noted that the Judges Act, which governs Canada’s federally-appointed judges, generally gives judges the option to serve part-time after they’ve been on the bench for at least 15 years. Changing the eligibility for a part-time position would require amending the Judges Act, the justice said.
“It’s a complicated issue to try and address from that perspective, but I have no doubt that if there were other ways that someone could slow down a bit without having to go a total of 15 years before they could go part-time, that would, I believe, result in the retention of judges for longer,” Nielsen says.
