Speaker A: Welcome to the Therapist burnout podcast, episode 73. Hey, therapist. Today I am finishing my series on therapist mental health. Yeah, I. It’s been a heavy month for me, I think especially sharing the last episode on Therapist Grief, which I hadn’t talked about for quite some time. Most of us have struggled with some kind of level of grief I think associated with the work, but certainly check that one out. So that was episode 72 and also 71. Why we wait till we’re burnt. Interoception.
Which, I mean, that was just like a light bulb moment for me. I think when I read some research that therapists don’t actually. We recognize the signs happening in our bodies, but we don’t do. We don’t act on them. Right. And I think that makes so much sense because most of us have spent our entire career suppressing our own body’s responses. I was in the grocery store the other day, and, you know, I have two kids. I have a lot going on. I have a lot of demands on me. That’s my season of life. I can’t just change that. I have two kids and life is busy. No, it’s the way life is. I wish my life was like a yoga retreat 24 7, but that’s not actual human existence.
So since I can’t have that, I. You know, I have times where I rush around. That’s just normal. And I was in the store and I had to go pee, and I was like, well, maybe I can just wait till I get home. And I’m like, no, use the bathroom. Like, just go pee. It’s not like it’s gonna take all of 2 minutes to go pee. And I think it’s those little nudges that our body’s giving us all the time that we’re like, yeah, we’ll get to it. I need to stand up. I need to get some water. I need to eat. We don’t listen to it. And I. I think the more and more that we start listening to those gentle reminders from our body that tells us something’s not right, the more and more we’ll feel more safety. If I zoom out to thinking about stress in the body, right? You’re thinking of, like, polyvagal theory or just the nervous system. If you’re burned out and your body is screaming and maybe you’ve developed your own mental health symptoms because of chronic stress and chronic fatigue and feeling like you don’t know who you are anymore, if that’s where you are, that’s actually a good sign that your body’s doing what it’s supposed to do because we weren’t managed, we weren’t supposed to be on that, under that level of stress for this long.
So it’s a good, we want our bodies to say, stop, stop. What are you doing? And so a lot of times I think we judge it and say, oh my gosh, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? Why can’t I do this work? Why can’t I do all the things? Why can’t I hold it all? Your body’s telling you can’t. And you know, I learned this lesson time and time again about my own capacity. And I judge myself still, still a burnout podcaster. I still judge myself for not being able to do more or quote, unquote, hack it. Yeah, I, I don’t know, I, I, I think it’s definitely this place that a lot of us get to where we expect things from ourselves that our body is, is just not able to do. I go back to my work with brain injury survivors and a lot of times after a brain injury, my clients would try to do the things that they could do pre brain injury and would judge themselves. And it was really my job to say, this is just your capacity.
Now you’re, you have a different cup that you can hold things with. Before you maybe you had like a 24 ounce coffee mug. Now that thing is like a 4 ounce little espresso shot. So that’s what we have to work out. And there’s things that we can do to grow our capacity. But you can’t go from like the 4 ounce espresso, like shot container glass to the 24 ounce without some serious work. Years of like trying to grow your capacity of listening to your body’s cues, and maybe you’ll never get to that point. Maybe you can never hold the same things. I’m talking in all kinds of metaphors right now, but I think you get the point. I think we judge ourselves for our nervous systems and really they are what they are. And I’m speaking to myself because I had pushed myself too far this past month and hit some nice dorsal vagal shutdown over the past week.
So, yeah, I was going to say I’m not podcasting today. I’m not doing anything. And it feels good to podcast. It feels good to speak this to you. It’s partially my work to do, I think, to get this message out. Anyway, just some reflections before I get to talking about ****. All right, what am I talking to you about today? I’m doing. I’m just kind of rounding the wagons. Is that the saying? The wagons are circling? Somebody tell me what. What saying I’m trying to use. I don’t freaking know. So in closing, I just want to again, talk about some therapist mental health themes that I’m noticing from the work that I’ve been doing, from my own observations. You’ve heard a little bit of that. And I looked into the research, and I’m always shocked when I looked at the research sometimes regarding therapist mental health, because there’s just not a lot of it. It’s just crazy.
How is there not a lot of research on us and our mental health? This is what we do, y’ all, but it’s just not there. So I’m going to talk about that because that is really shocking. So when I talk to therapists in my coaching work and my inbox on the pin PAL list, burnout. Therapist burnout, and I’ve talked about this before, is not just burnout, it’s compassion fatigue. It’s also depression. So episode 71, I talk about, is it burnout or is it depression? Something that I had to wade through personally, but I think it’s important that you make that distinction if it’s happening to you. But the things that I hear my therapist clients say, I, even my easy clients are hard. I’m staring at the clock when it used to give me energy. I used to love being a therapist. I think I’m depressed or anxious. I’m in therapy, but nothing’s changing. I don’t like the things I used to like. I don’t have any connections anymore. And I think these are the stress signals that our body is giving us. It has been screaming at us so loudly that now it is demanding attention. And that’s when I think the mental health symptoms start to pop up. So it’s. It can look like depression, clinical depression, anxiety, but also imposter syndrome, moral injury, vicarious trauma, and sometimes legitimate PTSD that maybe we came into this work with and identity confusion. And I think when I looked at the data, I wanted to understand, okay, how many therapists are struggling with their own mental health conditions? There’s not much out there. So I found a Chinese study that 22% of therapists screen positive for depression and 70, 17.9% for anxiety. In Austria, it was much lower than the general public. So I don’t know if you’re talking to me if you’re listening to this. In Austria, maybe it’s just a great environment, but only 8% of psychotherapists reported anxiety and depression. So significant though.
And in a meta analysis in 2025, it showed that 19 to 70% of therapists report symptoms of secondary traumatic stress. And those with personal trauma histories were at much higher risk of developing secondary traumatic stress. So what about the US or the UK? There’s nothing comprehensive. There’s no. I looked on the APA’s website because that’s my organization. I’m a psychologist and there’s a lot out there that talks about self care and burnout and being overwhelmed. But not tracking therapist mental health data. I just burn out. And sometimes vaguely like therapists are burnout. Like 50% of therapists say they’re burnout. When you contrast this with physicians, it’s crazy. So the American Medical association releases annual reports. And so the Journal of the American Medical association published a meta analysis with over 17,000 physicians showing a 29% rate of depression in residents. Federal legislation furthermore was passed to fund mental health programs for physicians. There is no equivalent effort for mental health professionals, which I find shocking, but not really because of money. The AMA has deep pockets and physicians sit at the top of the food of the health care food chain. So in a way it’s, I understand it, I understand possibly why physicians mental health data is out there because of funding.
But it just, it’s shocking to me, not really because mental health and mental health funding and care has not been prioritized by our society. So it makes sense that clinician mental health has not been prioritized or studied very readily. So I may be on LinkedIn this week. I might be like PSA, why are we not studying clinician mental health? Like who’s gonna do it? Somebody’s gonna do this? Yeah, I, I don’t know. So I was kind of dreaming up what is the support that I would love to offer therapists for their mental health. Like in a perfect world, in a perfect world there would be these, there would be therapy for therapists that was grant funded, that it would be provided in our training especially for younger clinicians who often tend to have the highest levels of burnout and stress in our profession. As we go further in the years in our profession, we actually have more protection from burnout. So especially for those early career psychologists and therapists, that they have something also peer referred networks.
The problem, at least here in the US I don’t know how this works in other countries, but I get a sense that it is similar. There’s no system where therapists can be paid by any other organization. To provide therapy services to other therapists. There are, you know, therapists out there that do that work, but they need to be paid for it. And I think the problem with expecting other therapists to shoulder that need is flawed because then we’re saying, oh, this is so important that we provide this mental health care to our fellow clinicians, but just don’t get paid for it because this is like we’re monks, right? We shouldn’t be paid for our work. And that perpetuates the devaluation of our field. Whereas this is a systemic issue. It’s been a systemic issue for quite some time. That’s what burn therapist burnout is systemic. We’re asked to do more with less, except lower payments. And that we’re doing heart work that we get in. We don’t get into this for money, right? I don’t know of any therapist that got into this for money. I, I, I haven’t met one. Not like I know I’m going to make money in my life. Let’s be a therapist. All, I think all of the therapists that I’ve ever met really are ethical and wonderful people. And when they got into the work, they just realized it did not exist in their lives. The exchange did not work and the cost was too high. I know that for some therapists, their own mental health care is sometimes life saving. It is a lifeline, it helps them stay in the work. So our own mental health care, the stakes are very high that we stay in this work. If that’s what you want to do, if you don’t want to, you know me, I, if you need permission, I grant it. Right? You can leave. Whatever’s not working for you, you can find something else to do. That’s, I talk about that all the time. So just, if you need permission, I always, always grant it.
Just by the way, you don’t need my permission, though. I also want to say, you are not just a holder of someone’s pain. You’re not a vessel for people’s healing. You deserve joy, you deserve support, you deserve to feel alive again. This is the whole point of this podcast. This is what I seek myself, because I came to the utter end, the utter end of myself during the pandemic. And I just knew that I wasn’t alone. I knew that this, that burnout and compassion fatigue was a through line in my career. I didn’t connect those dots to like a year into this podcast, like, oh yeah, I wrote a dissertation on compassion fatigue. I’ve been thinking about this for so long. And I think all of the stars aligned in my mind anyway of just how important this is to me of helping the helper. So what do you want two to take from this? Number one, you’re not alone. We don’t have great data on therapist mental health. We need more data I think to understand just the pervasive nature of the problem. How many of us are struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, other mental health conditions that are not well studied in clinicians at all. But I believe it’s greater than we know. I wish there were more resources for you and for us but a lot of times that those are options that we have to seek in a broken system. So it may take a while to get that support. But reaching out for that support is important. So what are some resources for therapists? Most of us know I think generally where to reach out for support. So looking for your own therapy in your state through typical channels. Right. Is what I think is available to most of us. There is crisis support. So I always mention that because not exempt to needing crisis support. So the 998 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is there. The NAMI. NAMI does have a confidential and professional support for healthcare workers. It does not specifically say for therapists. Yeah. Which is kind of a hard pillow to swallow there that we’re not included in that.
But I think certainly that might be like the closer fit maybe for therapists to reach out to someone somewhere like that so that as frontline professionals we are also there’s my pen pal list. So that is the emails from me and I do write back. It’s not mental support but I think it talks about themes that are specific to therapists. So certainly grab the link in the show notes for that. I think my dream for us is that there’s funding, there’s grant funding. Not therapist funded support which it tends to be, but actual grant funding that allows therapists in need to access expert mental health care. Specifically for therapists and other psychologists. You know, I think in our field we have a quandary of a lack of support. Most of us tend to be working in private locations, at least in the US So in private practice where we don’t have access to colleagues, we don’t have access to peer supervision. And that is one of the recommendations in a lot of these studies is to get peer supervision. Well, it’s pretty hard sometimes to get that support. That’s what I found. I my partner is a psychologist and there’s just something different of your. Your telling your partner your struggles Even though they are a mental health professional, than having a community where you can just go in someone’s office and oh my gosh, I just had a really hard session and this is coming up for me. And even if you don’t talk about the whole session, but just that initial offloading and support in a social setting that kind of naturally has some support built in, we don’t have that if we’re an independent practice. I’ve talked a lot about that, Isol, specifically in private practice and, and how we, we don’t have clinical supervision. So I, I found it helpful when I was in EMDR consultation because it was a natural spot for me to talk about my clinical work, which I hadn’t done probably for most of my time licensed, until I decided to do EMDR consultation. That was a fee that I chose to pay.
Again, affected my bottom line, but it was essential for me to do that. So that might be a tool as well to think about for you. All right, so what’s coming up? So in the summer, I’m doing a summer series. It’s around the theme of structured rest. So not in the. I, I don’t call, I don’t use the word self care because it’s just, it’s a dirty word around here, y’ all. But how can I think about ways where I can start listening to my body, start building in the real deep nervous system rest and regulation that I need, even if I can’t change my circumstance? So that’s what I’m bringing to you. Over the summer. I am going to take a, I’m going to take a couple weeks off the podcast. I’m going to have some episodes, maybe one to two weeks. I haven’t decided if it’s one or two weeks as I’m building out that series and preparing for a sabbatical over the summer. So my hope is to load up these episodes in your podcast player to have, you know, that cadence for you still going through the summer, and some email support as well. And then launching a group in the fall for therapists who are struggling in burnout and they want to quit. They can’t do this work anymore.
They don’t know what’s next. That’s the work that I do. I help people quit things. So I am, I’m looking forward to that. I will hopefully have a wait list for that coming up in the next couple of weeks. So if that sounds like something you want to do, get on that, get on my pen pal list, because you’ll be the first to know about it to be on the wait list. So excited about that. That and I hope you guys have a good one. Bye, Sam.
