- Mental Health
- 5 mins
Being a therapist isn’t easy! Providing mental health services comes with a particularly high rate of burnout, and that rate has shown an increase in recent years. The American Psychological Association (APA) reported in 2022 that burnout among therapists was “persistently high,” and that in two years the number of psychologists reporting difficulty meeting client demands jumped from 30 percent to 46 percent. While those numbers came at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when mental health services were in uniquely high demand, today there remains plenty going on in the world, and in people’s lives, that make therapy services a major necessity. This ongoing, critical need can strain therapists in a number of ways.
But if you’re a therapist, there are strategies you can use to keep the stress from getting to you.
The following self-care tips can help you keep the tough parts of your career from wearing you down. This is better not just for you, but your clients and the entire profession, because to take care of others, you have to take care of yourself!
Think Boundaries and Balance
People in many professions face a constant demand for availability these days, but in mental health services it can be a particularly taxing imposition. Work/life balance is not just a buzzword. Dealing with clients’ heavy emotions everyday, therapists must set boundaries and focus on balance to preserve their own well-being and continue working effectively in the field. As a therapist, you can do this by:
- Limiting responding to client inquiries and reading work-related emails or text messages to work hours;
- If you must do work outside of work hours, restricting it to a specific, limited time-frame;
- Avoiding watching or reading mental health-related news, especially traumatic news;
- Pursuing hobbies that are fulfilling and completely unrelated to the mental health field;
- Changing the balance of telehealth and in-office sessions you offer to make things more convenient for you.
Some work/life balance interruptions are, unfortunately, inevitable, and it might not always be possible to organize your life in keeping with the suggestions above.
But what you can do is take a critical look at your schedule, determining where work is creeping into your life the most and which factors are causing you the most stress. You can then take control of what elements of your schedule you’re able to, and streamline your life to make more fulfilling use of what free time you have.
Don’t be Shy About Relying on Friends
A recent blog from Psychology Today explains that therapists with social support from friends, romantic partners, etc., experience a lower rate of burnout. So while it might be hard to open up and easy to isolate when you’re busy, doing what you can to socialize and relax among caring people can better position you to manage the demands of your career.
Be Open to Easier Clients
You may be the type of therapist who finds the most satisfaction in:
- Helping clients who are in states of psychological crisis or experiencing acute mental health emergencies;
- Offering therapy for couples in complicated and tumultuous relationships;
- Providing mental health services to members of severely economically disenfranchised communities and/or people experiencing homelessness.
Working on such complex caseloads can, according to a Psychology Today article, be most attractive to people who have suffered experiences like those of the clientele, as people with personal histories of significant trauma hope to help people with similar trauma. But perhaps ironically, it is just this personal connection that puts them at a much higher risk for burnout.
Yes, therapists who are willing to help and guide people in high-risk cohorts are providing a laudable, invaluable service, but if working with such highly vulnerable clientele is burning you out, remember that these particularly difficult forms of therapy are not the only kind of therapy, and that therapy is important for everyone.
It is not a “step down” in your personal value or your value to your clients to step back from high-risk clients, temporarily or long-term, to focus on a more personally manageable client base.
Onboarding’s Role in Burnout Prevention
There are some less obvious factors therapists deal with during the workday that can, in aggregate, play into therapist burnout in a big way, such as:
- Having to deal with administrative mix-ups (misfiled or incorrectly filled-out paperwork, billing problems, consistently mis-scheduled appointments);
- Clients who are not as forthcoming, engaged, or communicative as necessary to make helpful therapeutic breakthroughs;
- Confusion over the in-session boundaries, goals, and necessities of therapy, on both the client and clinician end.
These all add up to frustrated therapists and unfulfilled clients, which sets burnout ablaze. Because in mental health services, as in any profession, people want to feel like they’re making valuable use of their time and bringing value to those they serve. For this, online client and clinician onboarding can help.
Onboarding solutions consist of short form online videos created by experts which walk clients and clinicians through everything they need to know, and remember, about how therapy is conducted effectively. This content provides easy, thorough explanations about up-to-the-minute best practices both for therapy sessions and all the operational/administrative demands of running a practice.
Onboarding both your therapists and your clients lets you streamline out all of those little problems that arise and accumulate into exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and burnout.
Take Care of Yourself to Take Care of Others!
Self-care can go a long way in improving your satisfaction, your ability to bring clients the attention and focus they need, and your chances for a long, happy, fulfilling career.
Part of self-care is setting yourself up for success. That means streamlining out what’s unnecessary, so you can more comfortably focus on the serious stuff.
So if you’re running a practice, implement onboarding as part of your operational strategy and your self-care strategy, and take care of yourself! It’s what’s best for you and for your clients.
