Site Title

Tag: self-care

  • Post #4

    Navigating the Field of Social Work with a Mental Illness

                   Many social workers and other helping professionals begin their career to help people with the life challenges that have afflicted people they know or themselves. It makes sense: people may want to give back or “pay it forward” as a way of expressing their appreciation for the support they have stumbled upon. Helping those who struggle with issues that you may have faced can also be empowering, in that you are not only managing your own mind and body, but you are proving to yourself that you are strong and resilient enough to help others. These are noble intentions. They are also often quite different and simpler than the realities of being a social worker or other helping professional.

                   Having experience with navigating mental illness and working in a position to help others do the same is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, knowing and having had the experience of mental health issues can help us relate to our clients or patients in an invaluable way. For example, consider the pertinent therapeutic task of rapport-building: to build trust with those we serve, it helps if they believe that we “walk the walk” also. However, when the worker has experienced similar realities to the client (or at least have this perception), there is a significant risk for countertransference and burnout, especially if firm, healthy boundaries are not maintained. This is a crucial point to consider, especially for new professionals entering the field.

    Social work is a field with a great variety of settings for employment, from the acuity of an inpatient psychiatric unit, to outpatient therapy, to ensuring the welfare of people across the developmental lifespan, from birth until death, and many more. There can be a high risk for countertransference and burnout in any of these positions. (I have experience though mostly in behavioral health treatment/therapy settings, where workers directly discuss sensitive mental health issues with clients/patients.) Social workers often enter into these complicated and stressful dynamics with upstanding moral intentions. in my experience, those who can endure are highly likely to have healthy boundaries in professional relationships, in that they maintain psychological and emotional distance from those they are serving, even in the context of vulnerable and serious work. I have also noticed that when a worker has rather porous boundaries, in that they may be reluctant to stand up for and protect themselves psychologically, there seems to be a higher risk of deterioration professional and/or personally. This perception/pattern is not usually evident from a small sample size of professional interactions, but rather may take place gradually, as the worker with porous boundaries invests so much of themselves in their work and patients, yet saves little time, energy, and compassion for themselves. You can consult the research and data for the more objective picture of burnout among healthcare professionals, and you will likely find ample evidence of the phenomenon of burnout in recent years.

    As someone who has struggled with symptoms of several mental health disorders, I also want to note that even if you maintain healthy boundaries, you may still be very susceptible to burnout due to mental illness traits. This connection (mental illness contributing to burnout) can look very different depending on the person, their demographic factors, where they have worked, and their particular diagnoses. A worker who has a depressive disorder and is employed in a setting with a high caseload of clients may burn out due to the sheer time and energy required by the job that saps the worker’s internal resources over time. A worker with an anxiety disorder may work diligently and seemingly without great difficulty on site. But outside of work, they worry excessively about their performance or perhaps “take work home with them” and spend too much time ruminating on particular clients (this countertransference can also be detected during work/sessions, and is pertinent to explore, ideally with a clinical supervisor). As a worker with mental illness, you have to be especially strategic and intentional about how to utilize your finite internal resources, for your clients’ sake and for yours. This care might look like having a firm boundary related to yours hours or caseload, or perhaps requesting to work with or not work with certain patient populations. This attention is especially crucial when you notice that your mental health and/or work performance is dipping even a small amount; then it is time to look at the big picture and be honest with yourself about what you can do differently in your personal and professional life to ensure long-term health and growth.

                   By no means am I trying to discourage those mental illness from entering a helping field like social work; we absolutely need this perspective in working with individuals, organizations, and society/policy to work with and on behalf of our clients. My aim with this post was to first validate the intentions of new social workers, and centrally to foster some reflection into what may lie ahead in your work journey, and what you ought to consider and possibly do to promote your professional and even personal sustainability. There is certainly a spectrum with how visible or open a worker is about their personal life and struggles, and it is okay to differ from colleagues on when and how much to disclose. And it can be especially difficult early in one’s career to assess how one’s mental health is being affected by professional life. But prioritizing one’s own health and honest consideration of one’s own trajectory with respect to mental health is a MUST for anyone in this field, in order to sustain yourself, the workforce, and those we serve.

  • Post #3

    Patience – What I’ve Learned (or am Trying to Learn!) from Burnout from Professional and Personal Life

    One hears many cliché mantras about the value of patience. And when we hear the same idea articulated over and over again, we may tend to tune out the subject subsequently. But this subject, being patient, is one that is worth your time, bandwidth, and energy to reconsider. I believe that impatience is one source to many of an individual and society’s problems, and that having the intention of patience (and walking the walk too!) can help unlock ample benefits and derive more satisfaction from life. In this piece, I examine patience as it relates to professional and personal life Burnout, in order to foster insight about the utility of living patiently, as well as to begin to offer reasons and strategies for prioritizing being patient.

                I am a Social Worker, more specifically a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. This degree and licensure allow me to work in many settings, performing multiple roles, for varying populations. What’s not to like, right? Shouldn’t I be set for the next few decades until I kick my feet up and retire? (Shockingly, no). I am also a dad, with a wife and two sons. While there is no degree or licensure needed to raise a family, it is a powerful thing not to be taken for granted. Both of these aspects, of my professional life and my personal life, while incredibly valuable and meaningful to me, come at costs. And from the title of this post, maybe you know in which direction I am moving – that these parts of my life have also contributed to the feeling of Burnout, and also that I am starting to realize the value of patience in preventing and recovering from this feeling of Burnout. In this post, I try to raise several perspectives and strategies to prevent burnout and remain patient, that can apply to multiple domains of life.

                Many people have biological and/or environmental (risk) factors that may predispose them to becoming burned out, in addition to the busy-ness of life and all of its stressors. Many people (but a different subset of the population) also have what is called protective factors, which help one overcome the difficulties of life; many of these are in one’s control, like the support network you develop or the coping skills you build, but some of these are outside of one’s control, like the neighborhood you grow up in or the medical conditions you have. I would consider myself to have many of both risk factors and protective factors to burnout. For example, biologically, I have/had several neurological/mental limitations, in a Brain tumor diagnosis at age 19, several mental illness diagnoses, some degree of perfectionism/OCD, and the psychological tendency to “spread myself thin” or “bite off more than I can chew”. However, I have many protective factors too, from ample support from family, friends, and professionals, to the skills and insight related to mental well-being that my career has helped me to gain. Essentially, it is worth considering these two sides ( risk and protective factors), in determining one’s likelihood to be knocked down and kept down by stressors.

                To connect the ideas of burnout and patience, I want to share an example of sources of burnout, and how cultivating an attitude of patience and developing this skill is relevant. Recently, after about 5 years of intense professional work in various settings for mental health treatment, like many others post-pandemic, my optimism and desire to help others has taken a hit, from which I may or may not recover. In this same time frame, I have also experienced the pleasurable and depleting source of parenting young children. My patience has, you could say, “been tested”, in that my willingness/ability to be caring and compassionate has honestly taken a hit, for both reasons somewhat outside of my control (biological/medical) and for reasons which are somewhat in my control to adjust (the psychological and social ones). More specifically, in caring for patients in crisis due to their suffering mental health, whether from building professional relationships and to some extent taking on the psychological weight of their burdens, and/or from the everyday challenge of giving part of myself to help them recover (both implicitly in simply attending to them or explicitly in teaching coping skills), I seem to have at least temporarily lost some passion for helping vulnerable populations. And many can relate to the stressor of raising young children (which I will not delve into here).

                So wait, how is patience related to the subject of Burnout? I believe there is a cyclical nature in this relationship, in that impatience can contribute to burnout, and also burnout can contribute to lack of patience. More specifically, if we are not patient enough to make sure we are “calibrated” or “filling our cup”, and instead rush forward with life because of internal and/or external pressure we face, we may be more susceptible to burnout. And when we are feeling burnt out, despite our efforts to engage in the present moment, our attention and compassion are more easily interrupted by fatigue and frustration. So, an important question is how/where to intervene to disrupt this vicious cycle. Below are several skills to develop or approaches to consider to facilitate patience and wellness, for which there is ample opportunity to explore further elsewhere.

    1. Practice mindfulness meditation
    2. Practice distress tolerance skills
    3. Practice psychological flexibility
    4. Slow down and consider the influence of societal values on your own “operating system”
    5. Compassion for self and others

    Patience is not just an idea; it is a skill, that many of us need to practice to improve. Doing so, and even incorporating it further into your mindset and life philosophy, has tremendous benefits for your quality of life (see the research!). Not doing so can have multi-dimensional, deleterious effects on your mental and physical health that can take a long, long time from which to recover. A good place to start to practicing patience is to consider your assumptions and beliefs related to professional attainment and identity. Figure out what your priorities are, and what allocation of your valuable internal resources will lead to the life you want. That can’t be too hard, right?..