Dread, exhaustion and rising helplessness: inside the burnout among Australia’s psychologists

Joanne Peters, a senior psychologist in the mental health division at the Austin hospital in Melbourne, says staff’s ‘fear of being judged’ can make it hard for them to admit they’re struggling. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

“The clients that get under your skin are the ones that you can see your life mirrored in,” says Melbourne-based psychologist Lucy*. Given she had worked mostly in the trauma space over the span of her 20-year career – and had never experienced trauma herself – that didn’t come up a lot. “Listening to them was difficult, but it never felt like something that was happening in my life.”

That all changed with the pandemic. Suddenly, “my life was the same as my clients”. They mirrored Lucy’s exhaustion, uncertainty, fear. “I didn’t want to talk about it any more and yet I had to go in every hour and talk through different versions of the same experience.”