Types of Stress Impacting Mental Health Therapists

 

Written by Kelsey Someliana-Lauer, Virtual Assistant with Therapy Practice Solutions



As a mental health therapist, you’re more than familiar with stress. Chances are, you talk about stress all day long - stress due to work, stress in a marriage, stress from a family situation, stress about identity … the list goes on! You’re also familiar with the best strategies to relieve stress - you’ve told clients about self-care, shared your knowledge about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and taught a healthy coping mechanism or two (or a hundred).  You feel you should be the most prepared to deal with stress - but what happens when you yourself feel the pressure?

Mental health practitioners experience stress from multiple sides.  Some types of stress practitioners experience are unique to a helping field, meaning others outside of a health and wellness field may not be experiencing it.  Check out the rest of this blog to see what kind of stress may be impacting you.

Compassion Fatigue

Compassion fatigue, or vicarious stress, occurs when we are constantly exposed to the stress of others and we take on that burden ourselves.  Mental health therapists are prime targets of compassion fatigue - we sit all day taking on the emotional impact of our clients.  This is especially true of clinicians that work with clients that experience high levels of trauma.  Just some of the impacts of compassion fatigue include sleep disturbances, PTSD, existential despair, identity confusion, impaired judgment, isolation, and more.

Burnout

If you’ve been in the field for awhile and are in a fast-paced, large caseload, exhausting environment, you’re likely to have experienced burnout.  Even if you aren’t in an anxiety-inducing environment, you’re likely to have experienced the symptoms of burnout at some time if your self-care isn’t on point.  Burnout, as compared to compassion fatigue, is the gradual process where enthusiasm turns to apathy and we no longer feel excited to come into work.  Burnout still has some nasty consequences - we experience exhaustion, lack of emotions, isolation, and reduced sense of importance or joy in work.

Stress from Balancing Roles

Though this kind of stress may not be unique to the mental health field, counselors are far more than just people who sit and talk to clients all day.  Mental health therapists not only have face-to-face client interactions, but are responsible for case management such as connecting clients to other resources.  Clinicians also fill out documentation such as treatment plans, assessments, and progress notes.  If you’re a therapist that runs their own practice all alone, you’re a clinician, a business owner, an office manager, a tax preparer, a professional cleaner, a marketer, a graphic designer, and more.  Whew - did you get tired just reading that list?

If you’re experiencing stress from managing multiple roles, from not having enough self-care, or from never getting a break, we can help. Reach out to Therapy Practice Solutions today so you can offload tax prep, reading emails and answering phones, making social media graphics, writing blogs, scheduling clients, verifying insurance, billing, and more - so you’re one step closer to just being a business owner and a clinician. Check us out at https://www.therapypracticesolutions.com/services today. We look forward to hearing from you!





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