Counsellor Burnout is Real
At the end of 2021 I’d been in private practice for three years and I realised I needed professional help, the kind that I usually gave to others. This was due to a medical trauma I had at the end of 2020, plus other stressors. I’ve had lots of therapy over the years (like a lot of therapists) and understood my own therapy would be an intermittent part of life, but the situation snuck up on me. Just because we are therapists doesn’t mean we can always see the wood for the trees with our own issues!
The lack of sleep and the anxiety just couldn’t go on anymore, and I started having flashbacks. It wasn’t the best time financially to reach out for counselling and I had a sneaky feeling (and I was right!) that there wasn’t a quick fix available for what I was experiencing. The difference for me (and for any therapist) is that not only did I need the therapy for my own wellbeing, but I also needed it to be able to practice safely yet it isn’t even considered to be eligible as a tax break.. My clients needed me to have the therapy. Plus, ironically, I needed the therapy I couldn’t really afford to be able to put money in the bank!
The burnout debate
Looking at the bigger picture momentarily, let’s acknowledge that a debate is raging about burnout and mental health problems in the UK. The Burnout Report 2024 states that 35% of adults in the UK experienced high or extreme levels of pressure and stress always or often in the past year. Against a backdrop of rising levels of people out of work due to long-term sickness, the polling of over 2,000 UK adults by YouGov for Mental Health UK reveals that one in five workers needed to take time off due to poor mental health caused by pressure or stress in the past year.
This has prompted some to say that the record numbers of people who are off work due to mental ill health simply lack the resilience that older generations had. Perhaps these people would tell me I needed to have a thicker skin. Some say that it isn’t new for people to be off work with mental health issues, it’s just that they told HR a different story. Others might say that the steep rise in mental health problems is down to the nature of our society: the fallout from the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, climate change, seeing images of war on the TV every day, to name just a few factors. Whatever the case, I will hopefully assume that if you are reading this blog, you know that these mental health problems are real and that it isn’t just the case that people need to pull their socks up and get on with things.
The impact on our profession
If these issues are impacting 35% of the population, it means that it is impacting (at least 35%) of the therapist population. For Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners, working in the NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression programme, prevalence of burnout has been found as high as 69% (Westwood et al.,2017) and this was even before the pandemic.
Some may assume that because of our training and knowledge, we must be immune to mental health problems, when in fact, the problems can feel compounded for therapists. This is because we aren’t only seeing the world, with disease, war, racism, and poverty through our own eyes, we are seeing it through the eyes of others too. An example of this is that burnout can be worse among therapists who report that they feel marginalised in society. It is hard to read the news about or directly experience racism, Islamophobia, or antisemitism, for example, and then hear about similar experiences from their clients.
If a therapist then has a bereavement, money troubles, an illness, experiences the breakdown of a relationship, or has a medical trauma (like I did) the weight of the world will get too heavy to bear on the therapist’s shoulders, and of course, these life events cannot be avoided. We are not immune!
It’s not all doom and gloom!
I’m very conscious this blog has been quite gloomy so far! I do love my work and I hope you do too. There are uplifting moments in therapy and, of course, the connection. On many days can carry me through. There are, of course, many reasons to carry on doing what I do.
Also, there are many individuals and organisations seeking to make a difference for therapists and, ultimately, the clients they work with (because one has a knock-on effect on the other). Good Enough Counsellors, run by Josephine Hughes, has a very supportive Facebook group and she also provides lots of support to anyone setting up their practice. Visit https://josephinehughes.com. Anything that helps to take the stress out of setting up a practice gets the thumbs up in my opinion. Creative Counsellors (https://creativecounsellors.org) is a wonderful community supporting creative counsellors and helping counsellors be more creative. They have a Facebook group for both members and non-members. Of course, I’d also like to include Counsellors Therapy Pot here (https://www.counsellorstherapypot.co.uk). We believe that counsellors should be able to access affordable counselling because it is so important for our work that we do. That way, therapists like me who experience a trauma, burnout or any other issue don’t have to worry about the finances, they can focus on healing.