I knew that my veterinary technician career was doomed when the work no longer meant anything to me. I could no longer make myself care about whether or not the patients got better. Nights of providing futile intensive care because necessary conversations about euthanasia were not occurring, other nights of unsafely staffed hospital floors and barns and whatever permutation of impossible workloads that contained.
The only nights that provided real relief were when I could escape into the stall of a favorite equine patient and cry into her neck, telling her that we were all doing the best we could. I worked all these nights in a state of self-preservation, a sense of threat and isolation, trying to practice a standard of care that the work environment and its demands made impossible. “Make sure you’re taking care of yourself,” people would say. That statement began to fall on deaf ears, it was cliched and meaningless in the face of the persistent challenges and lack of change.
Eventually, I found new meaning in veterinary end-of-life care, and finally mental health and wellness for veterinary professionals. As I write, I reflect that the loss of meaning is the last critical threshold one crosses before thoughts like quitting, not caring, and self-harm begin to stir.
In this essay I’ll show that veterinary burnout is not a disorder (despite its dubious acquisition of its own ICD-10 code), but rather a group of symptoms that begin with environmental imbalances and hazards and end with crippling emotional exhaustion and loss of the sense that one is working for anything. I will also suggest changes that go far deeper than self-care, and that hopefully provide relief and insight to suffering individuals and organizations.
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