Building the System

[Image Description: Seven hands of various skin colors holding puzzle pieces in a circle.]

The burnout of mental health providers is at an all time high. Dr. Kevin Hopkins, a staff physician in the Department of Family Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, explains this as “a combination of physical and emotional exhaustion that can lead to reduced effectiveness-either real or perceived.” The American Psychological Association found in 2018 that an approximated 21-61% of mental health practitioners were experiencing burn-out. And this is even before the pandemic (we’ll address those staggering numbers in a later post). 

In 2019, the World Health Organization officially categorized burn-out as an occupational phenomenon, saying, “(burn-out) should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.” But regardless of the area of life that feels the imbalance, we know from our work that it can begin to trickle out if not addressed.

While there is no shortage of solutions that can be applied at an organizational level to increase the overall well-being of the employees, one area we can start to look at is reallocating resources and building out a collaborative team, a system of providers to tackle the issue of individual burn-out. 

To balance the tipping scales and calm the ripples.

At a high level, Integrative Trauma Treatment Center (ITTC) is implementing three ways to build out the resources needed to improve not only the mental health of our clinicians, but increase access to quality care:

Trauma Coaches, Reiki Practitioners and our continued efforts around Group Therapy – including opening up sessions to the community.

By focusing our efforts on these three resources, we can help create solutions that are in line with the need for togetherness, openness, boundaries and increased meaning as outlined in the research to support the psychological well-being of providers.

You can read more about these approaches here.

We can only create lasting change together and we must work to support each other better along the way.

More Blog Posts:

• Trauma Coaching, Entering the Scene 
• Reiki in a Digital Age
• Group Therapy: Sharing the Load