I love the behavioral health field, but financially I was burnt out.

I have worked in the behavioral health field for about 5 years or so. During that time I also went to school to perfect my craft to be better. Years later after getting my Masters degree at Grand Canyon University in Professional Counseling and piling on debt, I don’t work in the field at all.

While in the field I had many different roles, but the work all looked the same. I was able to work with amazing families, that had their own unique needs. I was able to support families in learning coping skills, communication skills, daily routines, how to have proper hygiene, how to just navigate their community, the list goes on. As I write this article gives me chills and a sense of great accomplishment to be able to say that a family trusted me enough to listen and accept an outsider like myself to better their situation.

I remember being in many child and family support team meetings, CFT meetings, hearing families talk about how they were connected to an amazing worker that left the agency and they have been struggling to find someone new to fill that void. It is a sad reality, but this is a story that I guarantee all families can relate to.

I can say today that I am one of those workers, and I have some guilt saying that. I left the field because I struggled daily with the idea of being financially secure. I had NO CLUE what that could look like. I was 28, living at home with my parents and still struggling to make sure that I can manage everything that I needed to take care of. This is the same reason why I feel that other families have lost workers. The behavioral health field can not keep great workers because they are underpaid, and I speak for myself to some capacity, undervalued. I remember having meetings with supervisors, co-workers, and the really important people at the agency, getting praised for the work that I did with the families but because of billable hours being short of the expectations, that pay raise was no where in sight. Billable hours are basically how agencies stay alive. It is expected that you hit 40 per week. I struggled with this due to having situations where families could not show up or did not show up at all. Things that were out of my control typically came down to how I would be paid.

I write this article simply to say that there are some people that want to make change in this world but lose the love of the job because they simply can support themselves. I know some amazing people in the field to this day that I commend. For some it is not about the money, it is about the impact you make. I truly agree to that, but I hardly ever found myself being burnt out because of the work, but because of the fact that I could not afford to think about a vacation. I preached Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to my families all the time, and it applies to this very article. In order to feel secure you have to have your safety needs met. Within safety needs, is employment. While working in the field, I never felt secure and I found myself stressed about billables, stressed because I needed to invest certain amount of hours to my clients, stressed because some clients took the world out of me and you just wanted to make it better, and stressed because I had no idea what the future was going to look like for me financially.

Stepping away from the field has created guilt because I am not doing what I went to school for, and not doing something that I felt was my purpose to do. I am naturally a helper and when I was doing that I was not working, I was living a broke happy life. I only hope that the funding for the field gets better so that the lives we touch can continue to be supported. Instead of how it is now, a youth connected to someone they grow to trust and love and the next day they are gone, because that worker needed to support themselves.

Sincerely,

The broke helper.