Young Clinicians of Color Feel Burnout the Most. Why?

Mental health practitioners are reporting feelings of burnout and exhaustion after several years of offering care through a global pandemic.

What’s more, younger clinicians, and especially clinicians of color, reported feeling burnout more than their older white counterparts. They’re also less likely to recommend their careers to others, including those younger than themselves. 

It’s no secret that the mental health industry saw explosive demand for services due to the collective trauma experienced in the COVID-19 pandemic, which certainly has played a role in practitioner burnout—juggling longer hours and fuller caseloads.

If practitioners of all ages and backgrounds are reporting an increase in workload and demand, why are younger clinicians of color experiencing and expressing more burnout?

Burnout Culture Starts Early 

According to burnout coach Mona Eshaiker, LMFT, the causes of burnout are more complex than balancing a heavier workload during a stressful time.

Eshaiker explains that younger clinicians—especially clinicians of color—may be getting set up in a system that’s arguably designed to burn them out. 

Burnout isn’t limited to any one age group.

Mental health practitioners of all ages can, and do, experience burnout. However, according to Eshaiker, it makes sense that younger clinicians feel burnout more.

In order to progress in the field, she explains, practitioners are doing pretty intense work very early in their careers, often for little or no pay. 

Eshaiker spent the early years of her career working with incarcerated women and victims of sexual assault—both high-stress environments.

“I loved the work I was doing there, but I was doing it basically for free,” she says. “And a lot of clinicians do that. The field in general has normalized this idea of paying your dues, and working with these populations that are in dire need for little or no money.” 

When considering why younger clinicians might be feeling more burnout than their older counterparts, this culture is part of the answer.

With so many prelicensed clinicians working in treatment centers and other long term or 24-hour facilities, Eshaiker points out that there can be a cultural foundational issue that comes into play. 

“That ‘work yourself into the ground’ mindset gets normalized by our supervisors,” she explains. “One of my early supervisors literally had a twitch in her eye—she had reached that point of stress. And if you had parents or other role models who were constantly stressed out, all of this becomes just what we know. So, as we move further in our careers, this is what our foundations are.” 

For Clinicians of Color, Stress Compounds

Younger prelicensed clinicians need to work in these high-stress environments to gain experience until they get their licenses. For clinicians who share common identities with their clients, the trauma experienced during the course of the pandemic has been amplified. 

“A lot of my clients come to me because of my identity, and that’s something that happens for other clinicians of color and their clients as well,” Eshaiker says. 

“Clients want to feel a sense of psychological safety in the room with you,” she explains. “Maybe they don’t want to explain certain things, and all that makes perfect sense. But, for us, as clinicians, seeing our queer clients or clients of color being retraumatized over and over again is really hard, because we’re people too. There are certain experiences that will trigger things from our own lives.” 

Another critical thing to remember here, is that the pandemic didn’t actually change anything—it just amplified issues that were already here.

“We already knew a lot of the problems that the pandemic brought to the surface,” Eshaiker says. “We were already facing racism and discrimination. The pandemic simply amplified what was already there.” 

As Eshaiker explains, the difference now is that there’s more attention paid to these issues by the rest of the population after the pandemic everyone experienced.

“Consequently, we’ve seen a lot of retraumatizing and retriggering,” she says. “We’re all constantly reminded: ‘Oh, right, there are people who hate me just because I’m me.” 

This reality puts clients and clinicians of color alike in a place of constantly being on guard and being in that psychological state all the time is to constantly be stressed.

“Stress compounds. It’s not just one thing,” Eshaiker says. “So, especially for clinicians of color, watching all these things as our clients are also experiencing them—that stress has been compounding for a long time. Of course we’re more burnt out..”

Helping people manage stress and burnout is one of the main focuses of Eshaiker’s practice, and there are things that individuals can do on their own to relieve some of these feelings.

But, according to Eshaiker, self-care alone may be inadequate as an overall solution, as the larger change needed is more of a systemic one. 

Where Do We Go From Here? 

Helping professionals have an especially hard time taking time off.

“There’s this idea that because you’re a therapist, you don’t have your own needs, you have it all figured out,” Eshaiker says. “That mindset starts early, and that’s a problem.” 

Eshaiker points out that it’s especially important for supervisors to model this behavior for the people they oversee.

“We need to normalize taking breaks—real ones, where you fully disconnect, she explains. “We need to make it something we don’t feel guilty or judged for, and start expecting and encouraging it from ourselves and our peers.” 

“If you’re in a position of power in any way, it starts with you, and I mean that literally. Let the people you manage see you taking breaks. If you’re able to, mandate that people take a certain amount of time off. We need to forcibly create a new normal around this.” 

 

Not only does this help combat burnout, she says, but it actively makes you a more well-rounded and creative person.

“When we’re mentally and physically exhausted—and stuck in that stress cycle—our brains naturally go into tunnel vision. We can only focus on that one thing, which is why we’re less creative when we’re stressed,” she explains. “You’ve got to give your brain and body a rest because that’s when all the creative stuff happens. All kinds of things will come to you if you just pause and give yourself time to be completely disconnected.” 

These past years have had all clinicians stuck in that stress cycle, regardless of identity or age.

It’s clear there are larger issues at stake here, too big to be addressed by self-care and vacations alone. 

However, holding space for clinicians to prioritize their own health and well-being might be a good place to start. 

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