Exploring Systemic Causes of Therapist Burnout and Developmental Tasks

Curt and Katie talk about how the mental health system is set up to lead to burnout. We look at how therapists typically develop over their careers and how educational, licensing, regulation, and business factors can get in the way of this development.

It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.

In this episode we talk about:

• The shift from therapist development focus to a focus on client-care
• Sacrificial Helping Syndrome, Compassion Fatigue, and Burnout
• The systemic problems that lead to burnout (education, licensing, regulation, business practices)
• The impact of the economy on therapists being able to meet their developmental milestones
• The standard developmental stages of therapists
• The typical challenges of each stage and how a broken system can make these challenges even harder (or impossible) to navigate
• Some of the educational or licensing requirements that seem to go against how people best learn and develop
• The challenge of constantly being in crisis (whether it is about getting hours timely, financial strain, or working with clients with high risk) and trying to become a therapist
• How the people around us while we are learning impacts how we develop as therapists
• The struggle to set up a positive learning environment when you’re starting out as a therapist
• The most important time of training (prelicensed years, especially the first 70 hours) being plagued with high productivity and clients with high risk, which lead to moving quickly, not becoming stronger clinicians
• The reasons to slow down your prelicensed years for training and personal development and the challenges in doing so
• The aspects of training that would be ideal (and seem almost magical and impossible)
• Recovery-oriented training, crisis management, trauma-informed systems
• The possibilities for improving public mental health and other workplaces to provide a better environment to start and grow as a clinician
• EFT-Based Supervision as a good standard
• The conversations that we need to have with stakeholders across the system to work toward change