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Under Pressure: The Impacts of Judicialization
other professionals are also at risk, including physicians (see, for example, Charles &
Kennedy, 1985; Charles, Pyskoty, & Nelson, 1988; Charles et al., 1985; Charles et al., 1984;
Fileni et al., 2007), mental health practitioners (Wilbert & Fulero, 1988), and law enforcement
and public safety officers (Hall et al., 2003). Common symptoms related to critogenic
harms include, but may not be limited to, " sleeplessness, anger, frustration, headaches,
inability to concentrate, humiliation, anxiety, loss of self-confidence, isolation " (Gutheil
et al., 2000, p. 11); feelings of helplessness, distress, and guilt (Fileni et al., 2007); and
exacerbation of existing pain and injuries (Jacobs, 2013).
In addition to studying the physical and emotional impacts of critogenic harms on
physicians, Charles, Warnecke, and colleagues (1988) also investigated how these professionals
appraise the stress of litigation and its threat; that is, they examined the coping
mechanisms physicians used in response to the possibility of a lawsuit. They found
that problem-focused coping or positive event appraisal, in which the individual believes
a situation to be changeable by taking specific action, resulted in fewer physical and
psychological symptoms than did emotion-focused coping, which is " an evaluation of
one's ability to psychologically adjust to the situation should it turn out not as desired "
(Smith & Kirby, 2009, p. 1,357). The findings of Charles, Warnecke, and colleagues may
be relevant to the current study and future research; the appraisal skills and coping
mechanisms used by residence life conduct administrators may correlate with their
self-reported impacts of judicialization on their well-being.
Using the lens of critogenic harms, Glassman and Lewis (2022b) explored the
mental and physical impacts of judicialization on student conduct practitioners. Positing
that medical practitioners and student conduct administrators share common
personality traits such as a strong ethic of care for their patients/students and high
self-value (McLeod, 2003), Glassman (2021) argued that studies on medical malpractice
stress syndrome or clinical judicial syndrome-a condition that one group of researchers
called a partial manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder (Paterick et al.,
2017)-may provide valuable insight on how litigious workplace environments induce
real negative emotional and physical responses in its practitioners. Participants in a
phenomenological study of the responses of full-time conduct administrators to judicialization
identified specific mental and physical health concerns that they believed
were a direct result of their work, including " post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression,
weight loss, and sleep deprivation " (Glassman & Lewis, 2022a, p. 23). Several
participants used problem-focused coping as a strategy to manage these afflictions.
For the purposes of this manuscript, I define well-being broadly as the range of
physical and emotional reactions, including coping mechanisms, that dual role housing/
conduct officers have in response to the critogenic harms of the judicialized student
conduct environment. Much of the scholarship on the relationship between responses
to litigation and the ability to manage them finds them inextricably intertwined; how
one appraises (or copes with) the event determines their emotional, and possibly their
physiological, response (Lazarus & Folkman, 1987). However, Maddi's hardiness model
(Kobasa et al., 1982; Maddi, 2006) eliminates the event itself as a factor in coping and
72 The Journal of College and University Student Housing
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