Healthcare Workers Are Taught to Care for Everyone Else. Here's What Caring for Yourself Actually Looks Like.
There's an expectation baked into medical culture — that the people trained to treat suffering should somehow be immune to it. That asking for help is incompatible with being the person everyone else turns to for help. That struggling quietly is just part of the job.
I'm Ashley Partin, a licensed therapist at Life Success Counseling in Cincinnati. A doctors mental health is one of the areas I care about most — because the people carrying the weight of other people's health crises deserve real support, not just resilience training and wellness webinars.
What the Research Actually Shows
The data on healthcare worker mental health is stark. A 2022 survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that over 50% of physicians reported symptoms of burnout. Suicide rates among physicians are significantly higher than the general population — estimated at 1.28 times higher for male physicians and 2.27 times higher for female physicians, according to research in JAMA.
These numbers don't exist because doctors are weak. They exist because the structure of medical training and practice systematically deprioritizes the clinician's own well-being while demanding everything they have.
What Burnout Looks Like in a Medical Context
Burnout in healthcare doesn't always look like falling apart. More often it looks like a physician who is still showing up, still performing, still competent — but emotionally detached in ways they can't explain. Patients who used to feel meaningful now feel like problems to solve. Colleagues who used to feel like teammates now feel like obstacles. A career that was once a calling now feels like a sentence.
The therapy for healthcare workers addresses the specific dynamics of a profession that conditions people to suppress their own distress as a matter of professional identity. The idea that a physician seeking therapy is somehow less capable — that's a cultural artifact, not a clinical truth. It needs to be named and dismantled before the actual work can begin.
What Therapy Actually Offers
The approaches I use — Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy — are both well-researched for burnout, depression, and secondary traumatic stress, all of which are common in healthcare professionals.
But beyond the method, what therapy offers healthcare workers is something the clinical environment almost never provides: a space where you are the patient. Where what you're carrying gets attention. Where the standard isn't how well you're functioning for others, but how you're actually doing.
That inversion — from caregiver to person being cared for — is often the most unfamiliar and the most necessary part of the process.
You Don't Have to Wait Until It Affects Your Practice
The most common reason healthcare professionals delay getting support is the belief that they can manage it alone. Sometimes they can, for a while. But chronic stress in medicine tends to compound, not resolve. The earlier the intervention, the more complete the recovery.
As a professional counselor working with high-achieving professionals across Ohio, I offer telehealth sessions that fit around unpredictable clinical schedules. No waiting rooms. No commute. HSA accounts are accepted.
