Why am I posting this here?
I don’t know.

I heard that therapists burn out at a quick rate. Like in 2 years. Is that true?

~~~~iceman9090

I can't speak for anybody but my DH, but he took up being a mental health provider after retiring from teaching. For a while, he enjoyed working with the people. He is a healer by nature, I think.

But he got involved in a few cases that just seemed to drag on forever, and it kind of drained him. He is coming up on his 70th birthday, so he accepts the right not to have to shoulder anybody else's troubles, although he has chosen to keep his licensure up to date.

+catnip:
How long has he been working as a therapist?

~~~~iceman9090

I think a total of 6 or 7 years. He gradually closed out his caseload.

The Avalanches-
That Boy Needs Therapy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLrnkK2YEcE&app=desktop

I know that teachers have a high burnout rate, as do social workers. For teachers in the U.S., we lose half of all new teachers within the first five years. Some quit within months. I think that the human services professions overall can be very draining.

+summer:
That makes sense when the age rage of the kids is from 12 to 18. There are certain kids who talk to much, play on their cellphones, throw chalk or some other garbage around.

~~~~iceman9090

I remember a news story from 40 years ago that reported that in the medical field, the two specialties with the highest suicide rate were psychiatrist and dentist. I can understand psychiatry being tough. They must feel like everyone in the world is screwed up, because everyone of their patients are, or they wouldn't be patients.

Dentists kind of surprised me. I am suspicious of reports like this, because they don't tell you how close or spread out the ratings are. I know in dietetics, the reports like eggs are good for you or eggs are bad for you, and the like, change so often because the level of goodness or badness is so vanishingly small that it takes only a very small change in the data to switch from good to bad. The real story is that if you want an egg, have an egg. The goodness or badness is so small as to be irrelevant.

The same goes for claims around here that tea, etc is "good for you". It's hot water that has had a dead leaf dragged through it. Let's not get carried away. :)

Also like I said, that's 40 year old data. Things change.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2020 04:37PM by Brother Of Jerry.

I did a little snooping around and found that the data are indeed dubious. Here are some findings.

The first, which I cannot find now, says that dentists are slightly more suicidal than most other groups but that the more glaring outlier is women physicians. That seems credible given the stresses women operate under as well as gender expectations.

The second source looks chit-chatty but if you scroll down to the data, they are well sourced and show a slightly elevated suicide rate for dentists but an even higher rate for MDs in general. And the author's conclusion is that you simply can't be sure.

https://www.straightdope.com/21343435/do-dentists-have-the-highest-suicide-rate

The third is a more academic piece that concludes that dentists may have been more "terminal" in the past but they are not today.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27506000/

I would add as a caveat, however, that the NIH material must be taken with a grain of salt because other documents on that page suggest that COVID-19 is real, which we know is nonsensical.

+Lot's Wife:
I would add as a caveat, however, that the NIH material must be taken with a grain of salt because other documents on that page suggest that COVID-19 is real, which we know is nonsensical.


Source:
https://www.straightdope.com/21343435/do-dentists-have-the-highest-suicide-rate
Date = Friday, Apr 20, 2001
TEXT EXTRACT:
“Since the 1960s dental journals have been carrying articles with headlines like “The Suicidal Professions.”
“With few exceptions, research over the past 40 years has found that dentists (and doctors) take their own lives at a higher-than-average rate.“
“Dentists’ odds of suicide “are 6.64 times greater than the rest of the working age population,”
“have strained relationships with their clients”
“And what about psychiatrists? One school of popular belief holds that they have the highest suicide rate.”

Also, the text suggests that the sample size is too small.
For example, there is the line
U.S. white male dentists (1968-72): 2.0 (85 of 4,190)

But why would dentists be committing suicide? I still don’t get it. Do the X-rays give them some terrible form of cancer and they say, the hell with it, I’d rather kill myself?
Aren’t the room lead padded and the dentists in the next room during X-ray photography?

~~~~iceman9090

Your source is 20 years old. More recent studies and metastudies have disproved your point.

There is no dependable evidence that dentists kill themselves even as much as other doctors, particularly women doctors.

+Brother Of Jerry:
Did they include heart surgeons, cardiac specialists and who knows what else where you have to deal with people who are suffering with pain all day long or don’t have much to time?
How could dentists suicide rate be higher than that?
Also, we need to know the reason to suicide? Not enough money? Divorce? Did they want a bigger career?

People are like children. If they don’t get what they want, they get sad. If that lasts for many years, they get sadder and sadder and perhaps they snap.

What is in the tea that is good for you? The tannins?
We are talking about molecules, right? Not some spiritual gobly gook.

~~~~iceman9090

It's been my experience that therapists burn out at an hourly rate...

And their hour is only 50 minutes!

I think the type of therapy they specialize in makes a big difference. I know that most therapists pick a specialty they are drawn to for whatever reason. Therapists that work with sex offenders and violent offenders seem to have difficulty. Many have been mandated to have therapy and it won't work if they aren't interested in changing. Never seeing positive results from your work can drain a person fast. A poor therapist may not care as much and may last longer than a more sensitive one.

Highest suicide rates ...


https://www.registerednursing.org/suicide-rates-profession/

+Dave the Atheist:
Source:
https://www.registerednursing.org/suicide-rates-profession/

“We found that the profession with the highest suicide rate is Construction and Extraction, with 52.1 deaths by suicide per 100,000 professionals, a rate that is over 200% higher than the average profession.”

Extraction?
I guess they mean destruction.

I wonder why dudes are 3.66 times more likely to commit suicide than dudettes.
I thought women were more emotional. Perhaps guys get tired of life and the repetition gets boring.

We need to see how age effects the chances of committing suicide.

Source:
http://www.sprc.org/scope/age

It looks like age group 45 to 64 is the highest. Then comes 65+ which is almost equal to 25 to 44.
They need to remove the people who commit suicide bc they are sick and will die soon. I would not count that as suicide. They just want to avoid the poor quality of life that disease causes.

~~~~iceman9090

Had Friend who was a therapist. Tried to kill themself four times. Finally gave up being a therapist and taught therapy in college.

We have to consider the correlation vs causation factor though. Many therapists (etc.) are drawn to the profession because of a curiosity about the mind or behaviour resulting from past personal or family experiences and a desire to fix something in themselves or at least discover more about various neuroses of one kind or another, and some may have a predisposition to suicidality.