Nearly half of all therapists and mental health counselors report experiencing burnout in the last year according to the APA

Did you know that over half of therapists and mental health counselors report experiencing burnout just in the last year? That's too many.

Now there's so many reasons why people in the mental health field have a tendency to experience such high levels of burnout and a lot of them are really obvious.

But there's three that I think are overlooked and really important that I want to shine a light on today. So the first is we have a lack of a common mental health education in our culture and our society.

And what that means is that the average person doesn't know what mental health means. We don't know what a state of active mental health is or really how to contribute to it.

And that makes it really hard to set goals, and it makes it really hard as a result to work towards goals or to feel like progress is happening, change is occurring, right?

The second is we're living in a society which has a tendency to promote nervous system dysregulation rather than nervous system regulation, meaning so many forces in our society, economic, political, social, environmental have a tendency to push us into states of chronic stress, chronic fight or flight, right? And there are so many forces in the aggregate that it's just too much for one person, one therapist in 50 minutes, to try to assess and support their client to make a plan to address all of those different things.

So, it's a little, it can feel a lot like waiting upstream, right? The third is the atmosphere of shame and stigma, that surrounds the mental health field in general.

And this is when I feel particularly passionate about because this is one that I think is so easy for us to shift on an individual level simply by changing the way that we think and talk about mental health and it has such profound ripple effects in our lives and in the lives of the people we know and love and work with. So for example, when you ask the average person, what do you think about when I say mental health?

They'll say eating healthy, getting sleep, going to the gym, right? All of their associations, the majority of their associations with physical health are going to be positive.

The majority of their associations with mental health too often are negative. And this is something we can affect a profound shift in simply by articulating and focusing on and making our goal not an escape from mental illness and mental disorder, but a proactive approach and cultivation of the foundations of a true state of mental and emotional health. So if this is something you'd like to learn more about, how we help mental health therapists and counselors eliminate burnout both the obvious sources as well as the more hidden sources, the individual factors as well as the social and cultural factors, we can share with you a little bit more about what we do.

In resilience,

Caitlin