By Shauna McGinn

The listeners

On a grey November morning, in a small room at the back of a church basement, seven people are gathered around a table. It’s one of the first truly cold days of the season and everyone is bundled in heavy coats, unwinding themselves from thick scarves. On the street outside, Ottawa’s Santa Claus parade is starting its first leg – the sound of cheering and jangling bells comes through in bursts each time a door opens upstairs.

Church basements like the one at First Baptist are a popular spot for support groups, AA meetings, any kind of community gathering. To an outsider, this group could easily appear to be something of that variety. At the head of the table sits a woman in her mid-thirties with shoulder-length brown hair and a kind smile. Once everyone is settled in, they turn their attention to her.

She flicks on the monitor behind her and opens a PowerPoint slideshow. She clicks through a few slides, landing on one with a grid of pictures of actor Jack Nicholson’s character from the 1980 horror film The Shining. Each photo is a stage in the deterioration of his sanity, with the last one depicting him in complete physical and mental disarray.

Above the first image is a caption that reads: “FIRST YEAR AT SOCIAL WORK JOB…” followed by a caption below the last: “FOURTH YEAR AT SOCIAL WORK JOB.” Everyone at the table chuckles.

It’s knowing laughter. The participants are all workers from Restoring Hope, a youth shelter housed in the church. Out of concern about the privacy of their underage clients, the workers asked not to have their photos taken or their names published.

They’re at the workshop to learn about burnout, vicarious trauma and Low-Impact Debriefing, or LID. It’s something that the leader, Amanda Rocheleau, teaches as a coping mechanism social workers can use for particularly difficult days on the job.

This is, in a sense, a support group for the supporters. A place where the listeners, for a change, are heard.

The core goal of the profession – helping others – is difficult, and always has been.

Social workers are everywhere: hospitals, schools, prisons, community centres, shelters, and governments at every level. They administer programs, provide counselling, write policy, design care plans, protect children, mentor youth, and work with the elderly.

The essence of the work is the same across the country, but the profession is regulated at the provincial level, by a body that’s called either a college or an association. Ontario, the focus of this story, has both: the Ontario Association of Social Workers (which refers to itself by the acronym OASW), and the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers.

Becoming a registered, licensed social worker requires a four-year bachelor’s degree in social work, and a certain amount of work experience. Social workers have the ability to diagnose and decide on a care plan for a client. In contrast, social service workers, who need a two-year college diploma, do not have the same authority – their main job is to help carry out the care plan.

Ontario's College currently represents more than 19,000 social workers – the most of any social work body in Canada by far – which, against the population of Ontario, leaves one social worker per 787 people.

Sarah Pekeles, a master of social work student who previously worked in child protection, describes the job like this: when you’re in the hospital with a broken leg, the social worker is the one who comes into the room after the doctor leaves. The doctor sets your leg, the nurse puts on the cast, the technician takes the x-rays, and the social worker asks: “Does your home have stairs? If so, will anyone be there to help you get up and down them?” or, “Will your employer be all right with you taking time off?” Based on your answers, they’ll identify and refer you to resources, and may provide things like short-term counselling.

Many of us might not even know it if we encountered a social worker, because it’s rare that the job title is simply that. Among the OASW’s 5,000-plus members, there are more than 1,700 job titles, ranging from things like trauma counsellor, to mental health professional, to youth advocate.

The core goal of the profession – helping others – is difficult, and always has been. Without exception, every social worker interviewed for this story asserted that it’s inherently stressful, emotionally taxing work, a perennial topic of discussion among those in the profession.

So back in 2006, the OASW set out to discover just what that stress looked like. Researchers crafted a survey and sent it out to Association members, social work schools, and the College, ultimately garnering 1,114 respondents. They represented a variety of fields, like hospital social work, mental health, and child protection. The aim was to get a better picture of a social worker’s overall quality of life on the job.

The results were alarming.

The survey found that 63 per cent reported high levels of workplace stress, 38 per cent had been depressed and frequently ill as a result, and one third claimed to have experienced harassment in some form. More than half said their workload had increased significantly from the year prior. Low pay, lack of proper supervision, and scarce resources in the social services system were named as the major causes of stress.

Three years later, the same researchers published a formal analysis of the results. They wrote that the findings presented a portrait of workers who, though satisfied with their careers, were struggling daily with how to care for their clients within a “highly stressful and demanding environment.”

The analysis went on to say that cuts to social programs had created a situation where social service agencies were coming to rely on the committed, self-sacrificing nature of social workers to accommodate the volume of work and stretch resources beyond what was reasonable.

The closing paragraph stated that despite everything, the survey indicated that social workers “have an enduring commitment to the provision of quality client care…” even if, the authors wrote, “it contributes to their own exploitation.”

One of the Association’s main roles is to advocate for social workers, and it does so by lobbying the two provincial bodies associated with the profession: the Ministry of Health and Long-term care, and the Ministry of Community and Social Services. Donna Baines, one of the principal researchers, says the results were presented to both ministries and used for lobbying efforts.

According to Vanessa Rankin, the association’s research manager, a follow-up survey of the same nature hasn’t been done in Ontario since. But the results of a new survey looking at salary and job satisfaction are being published this June. It’s larger than the 2006 one, reaching 2,242 workers, the majority of whom work in the public sector, in addictions programs, hospitals, and child and youth mental health services, says Rankin.

In the study’s executive summary, the first significant finding is that social workers are spending more time than ever used to helping clients with complex needs – 71 per cent said they spend more than half of their time at work helping people that have co-existing mental and physical health issues.

The rest of the major results are nothing new. Nearly half of the respondents reported heavy workloads, with 33 per cent describing theirs as “overwhelming.” Other things that have remained the same: low pay and lack of supervision as major causes of stress.

In 12 years, little has changed. The pressures placed on social workers are getting heavier, and as a result, their mental health is under serious strain.

In other helping professions, the problem of being overworked or neglected has been met with widespread action. We’re used to hearing the strong response from nurses’ associations if a new healthcare bill negatively impacts them, or about teachers who declare a work-to-rule scenario when contract negotiations turn sour – indeed, there are examples in Ontario’s history of them going on strike altogether.

But apart from some sporadic job action in the last few decades, social work as a profession has yet to see an uprising of the same magnitude. A 13-week strike by the Peel Region Children’s Aid Society in 2016 was the first major job action Ontario social workers had seen in two decades. That one had to do with workload and frontline worker safety, and ended in binding arbitration.

"... the survey indicated that social workers 'have an enduring commitment to the provision of quality client care…' even if, the authors wrote, 'it contributes to their own exploitation.'"

Put simply, no major effort has been made to remedy the problem of social workers being overburdened, overwhelmed, and largely unsupported – and their situation has essentially gone unrecognized.

Perhaps it’s because social workers are harder to spot. Their jobs are diverse and fragmented across the social services system, each worker holding unique titles and responsibilities. Perhaps it’s because their work is hard to understand. Children are raised to recognize essential helping professions: doctor, police officer, firefighter, teacher – but social worker, not so much. Perhaps it’s because social workers are not as vocal about their work, the importance of what they do.

But just as the study results have remained consistent, so too has another problem: a lack of resources to help the social workers who are struggling. Those who seek help are met with barriers, often because of job insecurity, ineffective mental health supports, and most disquieting of all – pervasive stigma.

We’ve become accustomed in recent years to the concept of mental health. Countless public figures have come forward to share their stories of coping with things like anxiety, depression, or PTSD, as an effort to normalize a topic previously clouded by shame. Millions take to social media to mark days dedicated to mental health awareness, sharing and liking and posting about the need to be aware and supportive.

But as calls to action become louder, a vital cohort of people remains enveloped in silence. And as the conversation about mental health awareness grows, effective resources for those on the front lines of everyday crises remain sparse.

It’s not the clients, it’s the system: What stresses social workers out, and why

It’s cold in the basement at First Baptist. A few minutes after the workshop begins, some participants put their coats or scarves back on. The room is lined with low brown shelves scattered with children’s books, the mostly bare walls dotted with clumsy drawings; remnants of Sunday school.

Amanda Rocheleau is leading the workshop. The 33-year-old mother of three is currently working towards her master of social work at Carleton University, but she’s been a social worker for more than a decade. Her first job was at the Ottawa Mission, a homeless shelter and social services organization. Before enrolling at Carleton, she worked as a counsellor at an addictions recovery centre for men.

In recent years, she gained another title: Compassion Fatigue Specialist – a counsellor for social workers.

How that came to be is a hard story for Rocheleau to tell, but she shares it with the workers from Restoring Hope. It’s how she starts most of her workshops.

About five years ago, Rocheleau returned to the Mission from maternity leave and found herself especially stressed. She brushed it off as a normal part of being a new and working mom, but signs of something more serious began to peek through. She got the shingles, a condition normally seen in people over the age of 50 – cases in someone as young as Rocheleau are often caused in large part by extreme stress. At one point she also had what her doctor called “walking pneumonia”. “That’s just social worker’s pneumonia,” she tells the group, and everyone laughs.

Her first anxiety attack happened while she was at a concert in Montreal with her mom. The lights dimmed and the music began with a loud bang, and a feeling of overwhelming panic took over.

“In that instant, my hand hits my hip like this,” she tells the participants, slapping her right hand against her side, “And my heart started beating – and it took until intermission for me to be able to calm down.” When the concert was over, she kept thinking about the way she’d hit her hip, wondering why that had been her initial reaction to the commotion.

“Then I realized that for eight years, anytime I’d be at the shelter and I’d hear a thud or bang, I knew a fight was breaking out outside of my office door. And I’d grab my radio and call for help,” she says, explaining that the spot she’d hit was where her radio always sat. “That was a really big eye-opener, because I realized that there was a big part of me that was running on auto-pilot,” she says. After a moment, she starts to flip through some slides that provide definitions for what she was experiencing.

Burnout: “the state of physical and mental exhaustion that’s a result of prolonged stress and frustration.”

Vicarious trauma: “When we are exposed to enough trauma information and it very slowly, very quietly, starts to transform our sense of self, our perspective and our sense of safety. It’s the feeling of: ‘I wish I could un-see what I’ve seen’.”

Compassion fatigue: a condition resulting from untreated burnout and vicarious trauma, that “affects your capacity to feel empathy.”

Throughout, the participants make noises of affirmation – each definition is met with a knowing nod, as if to say, “I’ve been there.”

Then Rocheleau clicks to a slide with a picture of an oil lamp. “In an ideal world, we’re like this lamp. We’ve got this reserve … and we step back and refuel,” she says. “But when we get distracted and forget to refuel, then that light is at risk of burning out. So we come up with a new strategy – we start lighting matches.”

The mood in the room shifts. One woman glances across the table at a colleague, her eyes wide. Boots shuffle on the floor above. A door slams.

“We create the illusion that we still have that spark in us,” Rocheleau says, “but the heat and light from a match is not the same.”

“My clients don’t drain me at all ... it’s those bigger issues that are the hardest.”

***

On a basic level, it makes sense why Rocheleau was stressed out at her job. Her daily responsibility was to care for people experiencing homelessness, addiction, trauma, and in many cases, severe mental health issues. Like many frontline workers, she put in long hours, was inundated with paperwork, and often had more cases on the go than she could bear. But ask her or any social worker about their main source of stress, and they’ll be quick to assert that it’s not the clients – it’s the system within which they do the work.

The sentiment isn’t coming from nowhere. In the past decade or so, demand for services involving social workers has been on the rise in Ontario.

Take youth mental health as an example. In 2017, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Services published a “scorecard” for youth mental health care in the province. The report stated that from 2006-2014, there was a 53 per cent increase in mental health or addictions-related emergency room visits for people aged 10-24, and a 56 per cent rise in hospitalizations.

As a result, demand has swelled for counselling and other community-based mental health care covered by the province. But resources have struggled to catch up with this sharp increase, and it’s a problem that’s been well documented. Last year, the Canadian Mental Health Association submitted recommendations to the province in advance of the budget. It called for more funding for critical mental health services in order to reduce what it claimed can be months-long wait times.

This has added pressure on all health professions, especially social workers, who are embedded in every hospital to provide counselling and support for those in crisis. Since the majority of social workers in the province are employed by the public system, they’re the more likely option for the young people that are unable to access private services.

Scrambling to provide services in a resource-starved, high-demand environment results in a particular kind of stress that can be nearly impossible to shake off at the end of the day.

Françoise Mathieu is the co-executive director of the TEND Academy, an organization that helps train and mentor people in high-stress workplaces. She’s a registered psychotherapist and has years of experience in crisis counselling. TEND sees a lot of social workers, many of whom work on the frontline in child protection and mental health services.

When asked how many of them name the system as their main source of stress, Mathieu laughs. “All of them,” she says.

“The level of secondary trauma exposure that social workers have is extremely high,” she says, “And they’re also well aware of the limitations of their resources. They’re the ones who are supposed to refer people to longer-term resources, but often those resources don’t exist. So we’re seeing a lot of moral distress around those issues – as in, you know what needs to be done, but it’s just not there.”

A study published in December 2017 in the British Journal of Social Work defines moral distress as something that evolves from an “ethical dilemma” in which an individual, for whatever reason, can’t carry out a course of action they believe is best. The authors describe it as an experience that makes an individual feel their integrity has been compromised, resulting in “conflict between one’s personal, professional and organizational values.”

Mathieu says these feelings can be particularly hard for social workers to contend with. “I’m thinking of members of my team – one of them was a Children’s Aid Society supervisor for 23 years. That’s a massive amount of exposure to difficult stories firsthand – going to court, advocating for children, seeing gaps in the service,” she says. “It’s high exposure but also very difficult, resource-wise.”

Alison McPhedran, an intake coordinator at a private therapy clinic in Toronto, says she knows precisely what this feels like. Her job is to field calls from potential clients, assess their needs, and determine whether they can afford the $200 per session fee. McPhedran refers clients who can’t cover it to the city’s Centre for Addictions and Mental Health or other publicly-funded resources, though she says she knows places like that often have a wait list of five to 12 months.

She says it’s most difficult when she assesses someone who evidently needs immediate care but is unable to afford the services at her clinic. “Those are the hardest calls because you have to say: ‘No, we can’t help you, and I have no one to suggest to you’ – your hands are tied.”

"From 2006-2014, there was a 53 per cent increase in mental health or addictions-related emergency room visits for people aged 10-24, and a 56 per cent rise in hospitalizations."

***

“The system” social workers talk about can mean a lot of things: their agency’s management style, government bodies, funding structures. In each case, moral distress and burnout come back to one thing – inadequate resources.

“My clients don’t drain me at all,” says Jessica Malynyk, an addictions counsellor at a small long-term recovery centre in Toronto’s York region. “Of course I get sad, I’m so emotionally invested … but it’s those bigger issues that are the hardest.”

She gives the example of clients who are in need of a medical detox facility to start their recovery. Malynyk says she had a client who had been an addict for decades and was finally ready to seek help, but wasn’t able to get a bed for days on end. “They’ll say: ‘You have to call every half hour for three days before you get a bed’," she explains, “and if you don’t call in that half hour, you lose your spot in line.’”

What Malynyk, McPhedran, and many other social workers are experiencing is the result of a resource-strapped social welfare system.

Between the early ‘90s and mid 2000s, the federal government began to scale back on its “welfare state” approach. This was in the face of a trying economy, and under the leadership of Jean Chrétien, the Liberals made debt-reduction a priority and began to either cut back on or privatize social services.

The book Welfare Reform in Canada by Daniel Béland and Pierre-Marc Daigneault gives an overview of these changes by province, noting that Ontario experienced a particularly dramatic change. In 1995 the province shifted from a pro-social assistance NDP government to a Conservative stronghold led by premier Mike Harris, who was elected on the promise to tighten up the social welfare system.

Right away, Harris reduced unemployment assistance by 20 per cent and cut funding for social programs. His government also amalgamated a number of acts into what is now Ontario Works (the province’s social assistance program) and Ontario Disability Support. Béland and Daigneault write that these changes were controversial; critics said the system was aligning with the problematic idea that the individual is to blame for their disadvantaged circumstances.

At the time, social workers lamented what they believed were the negative effects of this overhaul. A study published in 2000 in the Canadian Social Work Review detailed how Ontario social workers were noticing harmful changes in both the job’s pressures and the clients they served.

Child welfare workers, for example, “noted how cuts to social assistance and subsidized housing deepened hardships … and meant that parenting occurred under even more strained and unsupported conditions.” Hospital social workers told researchers that the “lack of home care jeopardized the ability of their elderly or ill clients to manage at home.”

All of the study participants described a higher volume of work, fewer workers available to do it, high turnover, and increased pressure for paperwork and recording to prove the efficiency of their services. The funding cuts, the authors noted, made it so that clients had to be in desperate need of services before they could access them. The resources available per client became so tight that workers experienced pressure to get them “discharged and off caseloads as soon as possible.”

This led to a conclusion that was later echoed by the OASW’s 2006 findings: “participants found themselves working with people in more complex and demanding situations, with less time and fewer resources to do so, and with less stability and support in their employing organizations.”

Though social work may have always been a stressful job, the conditions in which it’s been practiced in Ontario for the last couple of decades have made it that much more complex and burdensome.

The authors of Welfare Reform in Canada conclude that the provincial Liberals – who were elected after Harris and have remained in power since – have been hesitant to make major changes to the social system due to potential backlash.

The authors reference a 2015 report from the Commission for the Review of Social Assistance that indicated Ontario’s system is in need of a “radical overhaul”. The end of the book’s Ontario chapter comes to a perhaps disheartening conclusion: that the pendulum is unlikely to ever swing back to the side of widespread pro-social welfare policies.

Still, however incremental, there have been changes. Currently, the province spends nearly $4 billion each year on mental health and addictions services. Last year, the Wynne government announced a $15 million per year funding boost for student mental health, part of which it says will go toward investing in “service hubs” for mental health care.

Advocates say things like the recent increase to a $14 per hour minimum wage and full prescription drug coverage for those under 25 are both important in terms of supporting low-income or marginalized individuals. The province has also set the goal of ending “chronic homelessness” by 2025 and has promised $100 million in annual funding for supportive housing, beginning next year.

The most recent budget takes on similar approaches, with the announcement that social assistance benefits will rise three per cent annually, and that seniors over the age of 65 will also be included in the free prescription plan. The province has also promised an additional $2.1-billion over four years to mental health and addictions services.

While these program initiatives have the potential to improve the lives of their clients, and in turn, the conditions for social workers themselves, it could take years to feel the effects – and a change of government could see them disappear altogether. Salaries for social workers are not negotiated and set by the province the same way they are for doctors. Even if the government decided tomorrow that it wanted to give money to support them, it wouldn’t be quite so simple.

At TEND, Françoise Mathieu tries to help social workers shift their focus away from the large and complicated flaws in the system. She encourages them to prioritize their own day-to-day health, as a way to improve their practice overall. But she admits that can be hard to accomplish.

She recalls a social worker from a large Toronto hospital who told her, “I don’t think you understand. If I’m leaving at 5 p.m. to go to yoga, and there’s an old man on a gurney in the hallway that no one has looked after, he could still be there tomorrow when I come back. Ethically, I just can’t live with that.”

Scant resources have not only caused significant moral distress, they have also diminished two important stress-reducing factors for social workers: supervision and training.

Much as how doctors consider one another’s expertise when deciding how best to treat a patient, social workers often look to consult with their peers when making a tough call – many of which can have grave consequences.

In Amanda Rocheleau’s case, it was deciding whether a recovering addict was ready to be discharged from care. A client could seem ready, but relapses are common, and the risk of a lethal overdose is highest in the time immediately after a period of sobriety.

These kinds of choices can be life-or-death, but because of shrinking budgets and oversized caseloads, many social workers are having to make them alone.

That was the case for McPhedran, the intake coordinator from Toronto, who first worked as one of two social workers at a small hospital in the city. Now 24, it was her first job out of graduate school.

Her supervisor wasn’t a social worker and had a variety of other responsibilities, so McPhedran was often on her own with the 100-plus patients on her caseload – 100 people to make decisions for, and one person with limited experience making them. She says constantly wondering whether she was doing the right thing caused an incredible amount of stress. “It was so overwhelming … (the contract) was three months but it felt like six years,” she says.

It’s a stark contrast to her current job, where she works alongside three others in the same role. Not only is she able to debrief with them, but she says she’s comforted knowing that if she can’t be at work for one day, there are people who can cover for her. It’s another big difference from the hospital where she says, “It felt like: ‘If I call in sick, who’s going to do it?’ They don’t know my patients’.”

Funds for training and professional development are often the first things to go when agencies are looking for ways to save money. Mathieu says this is unfortunate, because in her experience, it’s an important factor in preventing burnout – especially what she calls “trauma-informed training.”

She offers the example of her sister, a social worker in Canada’s North, a place where suicide is a tragic part of everyday life for many Indigenous communities – in large part a result of decades of systemic racism. “Do you really think if she saw 50 more people a day, she could prevent another suicide, or change the legacy of colonialism?” she asks.

When the province’s ministry of health amended the Regulated Health Professions Act in 2017, part of it included a fund for specialized training. Up to $1,500 per year was made available – but social workers weren’t listed as one of the professions able to access it.

Members of the OASW bristled at the fact that social workers weren’t considered, in this case, a “health profession” – when they are present in every hospital and most community care settings. The Association lobbied the Ministry of Community and Social Services, which agreed to cover a pilot professional development fund of $500 per year for registered social workers. Jasmine Ferreria, an administrator at the Association, said the organization is currently working to make the fund permanent.

Searching for help, then for answers

Not long after the concert in Montreal, where panic struck seemingly out of nowhere, Rocheleau found herself at another breaking point. This time she was at home, reading Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree to her son. A well-known work in children’s literature, the story goes like this: a boy develops a relationship with his favourite apple tree, playing on the branches and eating the apples. As the boy ages, he asks the tree to give him more and more – its branches to use as wood in his home, its trunk so he can build a boat.

Each time the tree seems happy, willingly giving parts of itself away to help the boy. One day the boy returns an old man, and all that’s left of the tree is a stump. The ending goes like this:

"I am sorry," sighed the tree.

"I wish that I could give you something.... but I have nothing left.”

By the time they reached the last page, Rocheleau says tears were streaming uncontrollably down her face. It was her story revealed, plain as day; she’d given too much and had nothing left. She’d arrived at the precipice – but, like many social workers, she found that there was little there to help her.

Her search for support came to a lot of dead ends: counsellors that were unhelpful because, trained as a therapist herself, she could predict what they were going to say; other social workers who were just as burnt out as she was; research that reinforced what she already knew about burnout and trauma, but nothing that could tell her why she, the caregiver – the one who was supposed to have it all together – was experiencing it.

Resources available to support social workers are at worst nonexistent and at best, either limited in their effectiveness or difficult to access. The first reason why has to do with money, or lack thereof.

Low pay has always been an unfortunate feature of social work, something as commonly understood within the profession as the fact that the work is inherently stressful. The 2006 OASW survey touched on this, noting that many social workers said they felt undervalued because of how their salaries compared to those of other helping professions.

Full-time nurses in Ontario, for example, start at an average salary of $53,000 per year, and can make upwards of $75,000 in the later part of their careers – like social work, the job requires a four-year bachelor’s degree and practical experience.

Of the survey respondents who worked full-time, most earned between $50,000 to $64,000 per year. But those hired as part-time or contract – something that, like in many industries, is becoming the norm – on average made less than $34,000.

“At times it feels degrading to think that after six years of schooling and solid experience and a graduate degree I am still earning so little,” one respondent wrote.

Today, the average salaries are about the same, with the pay grade being a little higher ($60,000 - $80,000 per year) for those with a master’s in social work. The other thing that hasn’t changed is the industry shift to part-time or contract work, which doesn’t come with benefits.

This makes it difficult to access even basic mental health services. Private counselling costs are steep for the average person, including social workers – especially in an environment of precarious job prospects. And without the option of sick or stress leave, workers are often faced with the choice of either toughing it out or missing work and forgoing pay.

As Gene Chodos, a child protection worker for more than forty years, says, “If you’re on a contract for years… are you going to be the one who steps up and says, ‘I need time off’?”

"Do you want me to do my job, or do you want me to do self-care?’”

***

After The Giving Tree incident, there was one option Rocheleau says she thought looked promising, or at least worth a try: self-care. When she brings this up to the Restoring Hope participants, there’s a collective scoff that seems to say, “Yeah, right." She pulls up a slide of real Google search results for the term. Among them: “go for a light jog” (chuckling), “stroke a pet” (more laughter), “take a nap” (raucous howling).

Self-care is a popular phrase within the mental health awareness conversation. It’s a term that many feel is in the same camp as new-age health trends like “mindfulness”. Self-care is loosely defined as a series of acts that call attention to minding your personal wellbeing: walks, time with friends, an evening spent binge-watching Netflix. It’s talked about in social work schools or used by agencies to remind staff not to overwork themselves.

Among the social workers interviewed for this story, it was often met with an eye-roll, or a head shake. The phrase “band-aid solution” and “trendy” were used more than once to describe it.

Rocheleau’s experience illuminates why. She says she put in an honest effort, carving out time to go swimming or use the hot tub in her backyard at home. But she says she spent the duration of each activity worrying about her clients. “I’d be sitting in the hot tub and checking my watch like, ‘Alright, has it been enough time yet? I have stuff to do,'” she says.

McPhedran had a similar outlook when she was swamped with work at her previous hospital job. “I would stay late and they (management) would say, ‘You shouldn’t stay late, you should self-care’ – which is the biggest joke in social work … the workload is so high that it’s like: ‘Do you want me to do my job, or do you want me to do self-care?’”

McPhedran says instructors in social work school indicated that although it was important, it wasn’t always realistic in the workplace. She says she understands why people try to promote it; it often serves as a reminder that it’s okay to, for example, have a social life. But she says ultimately, “it’s a buzzword … everyone needs self-care, it doesn’t happen.”

This is precisely the language that social workers use with Françoise Mathieu at TEND. Mathieu says she thinks one of the big issues with self-care is that it’s “built up as the be-all-end-all, and that’s not the case.”

Mathieu says it doesn’t help that many agencies often pay lip service to it. It’s not sufficient, she says, to simply “hand everybody a stress ball and have a company picnic and think everything will be fine.”

Stigma and the "Superman" complex

When they continually witness systemic problems, it makes sense why social workers may recoil at the idea of self-care – at the notion that reducing stress and burnout is their responsibility, rather than that of the larger system. That if only they’d make the time for a walk or an extra hour of sleep, everything would be more manageable.

But the core idea of self-care is this: in order to properly care for others, you need to take care of yourself first. And the resistance towards this idea reveals something deeper about the psyche of the kind of people who do this work. It’s what may explain why social workers remain committed to caring for their clients, even when that commitment puts their mental health at risk.

Mathieu says some social workers have the tendency to make martyrs of themselves, intentionally or not. It’s something that comes with the desire to alleviate suffering, which is one of the main reasons people get into this work in the first place.

“We can get so caught up in the urgency and we’re living on adrenaline, and we think we’re indispensable and no one can replace us,” Mathieu says, “but at the same time I really believe that we have an ethical duty to take care of ourselves.”

The most vital skill a social worker or any mental health professional has, Mathieu believes, is being present – being able to truly listen to and recognize someone’s pain and suffering. “I don’t know about other people, but I can’t do that if I’ve had four hours of sleep and I’m living on seven cups of coffee,” she says.

The other danger is that a worker’s skills won’t be as sharp, and they could miss something important when dealing with a client.

Rocheleau calls this the “silencing response” – when a worker has taken in too much traumatic information without properly processing it, and then begins to avoid it. So when a client is giving signs that they’re suicidal, for example, Rocheleau says that although the worker may recognize it, they are so depleted that they subconsciously avoid talking about it.

“I know it’s happened before,” she says, “where you hear that a client took their own life and you immediately think, ‘I knew it, and I didn’t go there'.”

Rocheleau says all she could think about as she tried to self-care were her clients. She’d go over a troubling interaction with one of them and pick it apart. Questions would incessantly flip through her mind: Did I take enough time with them? Did I miss something? Were they giving me signs that I ignored?

It was this very mindset that kept her from accepting that she was struggling in the first place. How could she be burnt out or feeling down when her clients had it so much worse? How could she be feeling overwhelmed, when she had a stable job and a support system at home?

“Social workers are used to being in this role of, ‘I’m the rock, you (the client) are the one who’s vulnerable,'" Rocheleau says. She calls this the “Superman” complex. This occurs when a social worker thinks of themselves as the helper, responsible for remedying any and all problems – and as a result feels like a failure when they can’t “fix” a client.

This aligns with the fact that many social workers are what Mathieu calls “over-functioners." “Many of them tend to be rescuers in their own personal life. I see a lot of folks who have many other caregiver duties, so they’re not getting to replenish or restore when they go home – they’re caring for others 24/7,” she says.

“I know it’s happened before ... where you hear that a client took their own life and you immediately think, ‘I knew it, and I didn’t go there.'”

The OASW’s research shows that many social workers have arrived at the same place Rocheleau did: burnt out, unable to bear it but pressing on, and struggling to understand or accept why they feel the way they do.

And if stringent resources, lack of supervision, and moral distress lay the foundation, it’s stigma that makes up the framework – a central piece that keeps social workers from reaching out, regardless of whether help is available to them.

Even McPhedran, a young person raised and educated in a much more mental health-aware society than those her senior, has faced it.

“I know if my friends said they were struggling with anxiety, I’d say: ‘No problem, totally normal,' but then if I’m feeling anxious, I think: ‘Okay, pull yourself together, you know how to get through this,'” she says. “Mental health is so normalized for everyone around me, but for myself? No. Not something I can deal with – and I can conceptualize that that’s not normal, but it just feels different.”

She says another piece of it is the fear that getting counselling, taking stress leave, or expressing to a co-worker or supervisor that you’re struggling will somehow hurt your future job prospects. Since it’s still early on in her career, she says this is of particular concern. “People don’t want to think that you can’t do your job,” she says.

It comes from the outside, too. Mathieu says she encounters a lot of what she calls “workplace toxicity” between co-workers in situations where there aren’t many resources. “Instead of supporting someone they’ll say: ‘Oh, must be nice to have called in sick yesterday,’” she says.

One woman who works in child protection, and who asked not to be named for fear of professional stigma, has experienced this. She says at the agency she just left, there were times when colleagues went on stress leave, “and there’s a lot of talk about: ‘Why did that person take leave? We’ve all dealt with stuff way worse than that.'”

She says she also encountered that attitude when some workers set boundaries from work, ones that would qualify as “self-care”. “The worker that checks out at 5 o’clock and doesn’t work weekends … they may not be seen as much of a team player because they’re not helping. There’s definitely a lot of stigma around that,” she says.

Management’s awareness of the problem wasn’t always helpful. “Managers will notice sometimes when people are stressed, and they’ll say: ‘How can I help you, what can I do?,'” she says, “but what do you say? Because if you say, ‘Can you take me off the on-call schedule?,' that’s just going onto my co-workers, and that adds to your guilt, and to the team cohesion.”

Even if a social worker overcomes the barriers before them – accepting that they’re struggling, accessing resources, overcoming internal stigma – the final step of confronting professional stigma can be too much to bear, forcing many of them back into silence.

Chodos, the seasoned child protection worker, acknowledges this, “We’re not the kind of people who are going to say, ‘I can’t do it'," she says.

The “ideal world”

Tucked up above a pharmacy on Toronto’s Queen Street East are the offices of the Inner City Family Health team. Funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health, the team works with individuals who are either homeless or have experienced homelessness, and have at some point stayed at nearby Seaton House shelter. Along with a doctor, psychiatrist, and a few nurses, there are two social workers on staff. Cheryl Eadie is one of them.

Just shy of five feet tall with a strawberry-blonde pixie cut and a wide smile, Eadie’s sunny demeanor is akin to a summer camp counsellor – perhaps not what would be expected from a social worker with more than a decade of experience working with the homeless.

Eadie holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology from the University of Toronto, and a master of social work from Carleton. Now 41, she spent nearly seven years at the City of Toronto’s Shelter, Support, and Housing division before joining Inner City health.

She’s quick to proclaim that it’s the best social work job she’s ever had. A typical week for her (because, as she says, there are no typical days in social work) includes a full day at Seaton House, individual counselling, group therapy, and regular drop-in hours.

She says it’s a major contrast to her experience at the City of Toronto – she left that job because of what she says was overwhelming stress. There, she had a caseload of about 50-60 people, all of whom needed a lot of help and care. “No matter how hard I worked, I knew that there were many people I was not adequately helping,” Eadie says. “That was extremely difficult to cope with, and there was really no institutional support at all.”

The ideal caseload varies depending on the social worker – someone who provides bi-weekly counselling appointments, for example, may be able to handle a large number of clients at a time. But given the kinds of clients Eadie had – people with complex issues who needed a lot of time and care – a caseload of even 25 would have been pushing it.

Eadie’s current situation is in many ways a model example for the kinds of things social workers need in order to be properly supported. Her job’s benefits include clinical supervision; once a month she consults with an outside professional with a PhD in social work who helps her with her most challenging cases.

She also goes to a monthly trauma-focused workshop, which she says is essentially a support group for social workers in roles like hers. The team’s executive director is a social worker who has extensive experience in mental health work, and Eadie sings her praises, noting that she “just gets it, on that deep level.”

Eadie says one of the main things that reduces stress for her is the variety and flexibility of the schedule, “I think if all I did was individual counselling appointments, the heaviness of that would probably really get to me. But because I’m able to do a variety of different types of work, that helps.” It also helps, she says, that the team works in the same building and consults on cases together, “We debrief a lot," she says, "I never feel like I’m abandoned here.”

In her previous job with the City of Toronto, Eadie didn’t have the same supervision, and her superiors didn’t encourage or support training. In her view, it’s not the funding structure between her previous role and the Inner City team that makes the difference. “It was more from the management side,” she says, “Their philosophy and understanding was, ‘Oh that's just a frill, you don’t need that,’ (supervision or training) or, ‘Oh, you just want an afternoon off.’ It was not seen as necessary.’”

That feeling of being abandoned with a high-needs caseload led to inevitable moral distress. “If you had done this interview with me when I worked for the City, I would’ve been a completely different human being,” she says, “I was stressed, I felt ethically like I wasn’t doing a good enough job … for me it didn’t feel like an ethical way to work.”

It wasn’t just Eadie who felt that way – she says sick leaves were the norm. “That’s how people coped. So instead of getting help to circumvent the need to do that, since there was no help available, it would just build and build and build until someone just couldn’t take it anymore," she says.

Not only did this add to the burdens of the workers that remained, it also made things more difficult for the clients, many of whom were already struggling to form healthy attachments. “Think about a marginalized person who may have a severe trauma background … and they have this merry-go-round of different counsellors. They’re not going to go to you for help, they don’t know how long you’re going to be there,” Eadie explains, “so it totally undercuts that relationship that you need.”

“We’re not the kind of people who are going to say, ‘I can’t do it.'”

Cracks in the ceiling

Often, the first people to feel the impact of burnt out and overwhelmed social workers are their clients. It’s a result of the zero-sum game at play – limited resources for both the client and the worker.

Eadie says the work environment at the City of Toronto was in many ways a breeding ground for this problem. “Some co-workers, their level of patience and compassion was just completely depleted. The skill level would just erode and erode and erode in terms of how they would interact with clients,” she says.

It’s the embodiment of what Rocheleau describes as compassion fatigue.

“If you were just a fly on the wall in a City-run homeless shelter, and you listened to how the staff interact with clients, it is appalling,” Eadie says. Although there are of course exceptions, Eadie says that, “the people who are burnt out in that system are burnt out at an extreme level, and are just completely discriminatory, disrespectful, condescending to clients … and what’s sad is that I’m sure they didn’t start out that way.”

With the way her job is now, Eadie says in hindsight she believes the lack of staff support was the most aggravating factor. “It’s a trickle-down. We’re just human beings, and the more you pile on somebody and don’t give them the proper support, they’re not going to be good at what they do,” she says. “It’s very difficult to sit and have the capacity to be with someone who’s in a lot of pain and have compassion for that if you yourself are hardly holding it together.”

Rachelle Ashcroft, an assistant professor in the faculty of social work at the University of Toronto, says this level of burnout is dangerous because it can allow things to slip through the cracks.

“A uniqueness with social work is that it’s such a relational practice – you have to be in your best form in order to be present, and you have to be able to engage and listen,” she says, “and if you’re not, then it detracts from the type of encounter that you’re having with somebody, and your assessment skills might not be as sharp.”

It’s most dangerous in situations like the ones both Eadie and Rocheleau described, or, as Ashcroft says, in areas with an ever-increasing demand for services, like mental health.

Ashcroft is currently the principal investigator on a project that’s looking into how mental health care is delivered by Ontario Family Health Teams, which are groups of health professionals that work together to provide services in a certain area, or for a specific population.

She says the main problem she’s hearing about from participants – including social workers – is lack of time and resources to respond to the high demand for care.

“There’s more than likely always been this high demand that hasn’t necessarily been realized,” she says, “so suddenly it’s like: ‘Well, we can’t meet this demand.'”

The OASW’s 2009 analysis confirmed these uneven trajectories. It stated that the increase in the number of clients that needed help, and the level of help they needed, meant that workers were struggling just to stay on top of it all. Clients, they wrote, were left “alienated, frustrated, and disempowered.”

In the end, it came down to a choice between two evils: “we are faced with the decision to either shortchange the client or shortchange ourselves,” one participant said.

“I know if my friends said they were struggling with anxiety, I’d say: ‘No problem, totally normal,' but then if I’m feeling anxious, I think: ‘Okay, pull yourself together, you know how to get through this.'"

The term “domino effect” is often used when discussing social issues – one problem leads to another, and suddenly everyone is impacted. You use a plastic bag to carry your groceries home, that bag ends up in a congested landfill, and eventually toxic chemicals seep into the soil.

This issue can be described in a similar way, only it’s more difficult to trace each domino – to see which one, exactly, causes the next one to fall.

A social worker is burnt out, numbly going forward, and their client feels neglected, their pressing issues ignored. Maybe that leads to them harming themselves or someone else. Maybe that means a foster parent doesn’t let a worker know when things are breaking down. Maybe a child runs away. Maybe, maybe.

The average person may not be able to see the last domino before it’s about to fall, to trace it back to a social worker staggering under the weight of an oversized caseload and a broken system.

It’s more like a crack in a ceiling, one that lets rainwater occasionally leak through. Most people wouldn’t notice until there’s a puddle on the floor, and still, that’s easy to ignore. But even if the rest of the ceiling is intact, the roof is still at risk of caving in. Eventually, the steady beat of rainwater will cause it all to come crashing down.

Finding responsibility

When everything appears to circle back to the lack of resources in our social system, it seems natural to look upwards, to place blame on the provincial and federal governments for not doing enough.

But envisioning a clear remedy to the problem isn’t so simple. Funding for health care and social services are largely determined by the government in power at both levels. A strong social welfare mindset could be in place, only to be reversed with a change of government, like Ontario in the Mike Harris years.

And every social worker needs more resources in some sense or another: the addictions worker needs more detox beds, the counsellor needs more funds for training, the child protection worker needs more paid overtime, and so on.

“We are faced with the decision to either shortchange the client or shortchange ourselves.”

The Ontario government bodies connected to social work are the Ministries of Health, Children and Youth, and Community and Social Services. When asked what resources they employ to support social workers in light of increasing demands and risk of burnout, each ministry said they were unable to comment because they do not directly regulate the profession. Each referred back to the OASW or the College.

Both of those organizations are funded through member contributions. The Association mainly focuses on advocacy and professional development, as does the College, which also oversees disciplinary actions against social workers.

At present, the path toward change may have more to do with the value placed on social workers, and a need for agencies to reassess the way priorities are set.

Cheryl Eadie’s experiences, both at the City of Toronto and at her current Family Health Team, provide a good example.

“It is ridiculous that I ever had a 50-person caseload there, and that was definitely a philosophy thing,” she says. “If the system doesn’t value the people that you’re working with, they’re not going to value you or the work you do either.”

Eadie says she believes it’s a devaluing from the top down. “That’s where I think a lot of social workers have this real disconnect, when your team says that their values and philosophies are about empowerment and inclusivity, but they don’t treat their staff that way at all,” she says. “You can’t expect people to provide that kind of care when the organization doesn’t provide that kind of care for their staff.”

Much like self-care, it’s easy to imagine how that notion could be met with a scoff of “yeah, right” from agencies with managers who are just as stressed out and running on empty as their workers.

But Todd Leader, who has decades of experience managing teams of social workers, begs to differ. He’s spent a good portion of his career developing and improving how services are delivered to people with addictions and mental health issues. A big part of that is examining the way agencies are structured, and how workloads can be rearranged to better serve clients. As a result, he says he believes changing some core aspects of workplace culture is one of the most promising ways to manage burnout.

According to Leader, burnout becomes more likely when tedious tasks start to take away from meaningful client interaction that social workers value. “Nobody has passion for paperwork,” he says.

Recording client interactions is important in social work for a few reasons: like other licensed professionals, they are liable in their jobs. Maintaining consistent records is also a requirement under their code of ethics, and the records are also shown to management, donors, or government bodies to prove the need for and efficiency of the service they’re providing.

Because of that, Leader says he understands why there’s a lot of pressure to do paperwork and data entry. But if that starts to get in the way of things a social worker is meant to do, he says it will inevitably led to burnout and widespread job dissatisfaction.

The goal should be about “maximizing the frontline work for frontline workers,” Leader says. That way, he explains, staff end up spending more time doing the work that matters to them, which prevents burnout even when things get stressful. He says facilitating this environment is “strictly up to management at all levels, going right up to government levels.”

Leader says he thinks it’s too short sighted for agencies to place the blame on not having enough resources at their disposal. “People claim that it’s a lack of resources, when nobody has actually looked closely into the system part and asked the question, ‘Well, how much of the social worker’s time are we using doing other things that are less important than the client work? And what if we freed up all of that time, how many more social workers, in terms of equivalents, would we end up having?'” he says.

It can be hard to imagine how this would play out in an agency that serves people with complex and pressing needs, and when there’s a high demand for services. But it’s not a groundless strategy. In the youth mental health case, when enough organizations spoke up about the high wait times, the Ontario government did respond with more funding for critical services.

In his own experience Leader has tried simple fixes, like letting people have more choice in terms of work hours. For example, at a mental health care agency he managed, he let workers sign up for optional evening appointment shifts, and then allowed them to take a half-day off some other time in the week.

“Staff end up feeling guilty if they don’t (work overtime),” he says, because there are so many people who need their services. “It’s not that that’s not true, but if they’re all constantly working extra hours, working at home, and weekends … then management cannot make a really good argument to government that we need more staff," he says, "if everybody’s picking up the slack and all the clients are being served, how can I say we need more (workers)?”

Leader says that although there are of course exceptions, “the goal should be to protect staff. And if that leaves wait times going higher, or things like that, well then there’s concrete evidence to say, ‘We still have this gap. So there’s the proof that we need more.’”

“If the system doesn’t value the people that you’re working with, they’re not going to value you or the work you do either.”

Even if managers and agencies employed Leader’s strategies, stepping away or disconnecting is ultimately up to the worker – and sometimes that can feel impossible.

Keren Wisiniewski is a child-in-care worker at Jewish Family and Child Services in Toronto. She works with children who come into the care of the agency, and is “basically their mom, more or less.” She has a caseload of 15 clients ranging from age 2-24.

“These are kids that are texting me at 9 p.m. with a question … these are kids that are putting my name down as their emergency contact, or their reference,” she says. Last summer, Wisiniewski went on vacation to Florida for two weeks. Every day, she received texts from her kids – and she says she responded to all of them.

“I can make the choice not to answer. It’s not like an agency requirement that I answer my phone,” she says. "But again, these are like my kids. I’ve had situations where foster parents have called me at 10 at night saying, ‘Things are breaking down, can you come and help?’.”

Though it’s stressful and exhausting at times, she says for her it comes down to one thing: “How could I leave my kids?”

Now that Eadie has had enough distance from her previous job, she says she can see more clearly the curious balance that Leader and Wisiniewski are articulating.

“To one extent you do have to be accountable for your own ethical practice,” Eadie says. “Part of the code of ethics (for registered social workers) is that you’re supposed to be able to have that level of self-awareness so that you are checking in, and making sure that you are getting the support you need, to do the job you need to do.”

Eadie says she thinks it’s unfair for individual workers to place blame entirely on their agencies. “We can’t say: ‘Well, the reason I do zero self-care and I have no compassion for my clients is because of my boss.'” But she acknowledges that in environments that are more difficult or resource-strapped than hers, it’s a different story. “I can imagine in a different workplace, it’s not so easy to set those limits for yourself, and it’s not so easy to get proper clinical supervision. So that’s where agencies have to be realistic,” she says.

The ideal world is a place where the work is properly valued, resources are abundant, and agencies have re-modelled their approach to care for the health of their workers above all else. But even then, the question of stigma arises, and the struggle to overcome the "Superman complex," for many, remains.

“The idea is that if you’re supposed to be skilled at helping other people build their resiliency and cope with mental health issues, then why can’t you just do that for yourself?” Eadie says. "But dentists don’t fix their own fillings. We all need to go to others for support and help.”

The listeners

If every component in this issue were a brick placed into a bag, it would be heavy – impossible for most people to carry.

Social work is inherently difficult, but the current social system creates more complex burdens in the work. One brick.

The more empathetic, committed, and caring a social worker is, the better they’ll be at the work, but the greater risk they’ll have of experiencing burnout, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue. A second brick. Many who go into the field have their own histories of trauma, which provide an enduring motivation but further increases the risk of experiencing all of the above. A third brick.

Resources lagging behind an ever-increasing demand for services, low wages, contract work, internal and external stigma – each weigh it down even more.

For years, social workers have been dragging this impossibly heavy bag around. Each day they shuffle forward, staggering under the weight, determined to reach the most important thing of all – their clients.

Every worker interviewed here, after detailing the incredible stresses of the job, their frustrations, their anger towards the system, made sure to reassert one thing: that despite everything, even the smallest positive interaction with a client could make it all worth it.

The wins were small and rare, the risks huge, the losses painful, but the most microscopic of victories – like, in one case, teaching a chronically homeless person how to use a cellphone – helped keep many of them going.

Gene Chodos says that throughout her career, she’s held tightly to what she calls her “touchstone” - protecting children. “That gets me through the night, it gets me through the days. It’s my core and it’s what I bring to the work,” she says. On hard days, when she gets home from work at 9 p.m. and collapses on the couch, having eaten nothing since breakfast, she repeats it to herself: “I’m protecting children.”

It’s best explained by Mikaela Barrington-Bush, a frontline worker at the Shepherds of Good Hope shelter in Ottawa. She manages 40 clients in a live-in alcohol addiction recovery program, and 60 in a related long-term care facility. She makes about $2,700 a month after taxes. Her office windows are reinforced with steel.

When asked what keeps her coming back to the job, despite the stress, she doesn’t even pause to think. “I love the clients so much,” she says. “They’re really special people. They’re the people that never fit into the boxes, so there’s a level of realness to them that we don’t often get in others,” she says. “Being in their midst makes life so much more meaningful.”

When faced with issues like addiction, poverty, or mental illness, thinking about the wellbeing of the people trying to fix them – helping the helpers – might not be at the top of the list.

But to have social workers go on like this is to continue toward the inevitable crash.

The most vulnerable will be the first to feel the effects – indeed, they already have. Therese Jennissen, an assistant professor at Carleton’s school of social work, likes to say that “we are all one or two tragedies away from being that person” – the one in immediate need.

You have a mental health issue and you lose your job, for example. Or your child becomes gravely ill, and you’re plunged into a world you never imagined you’d have to live in, suddenly juggling caregiver duties with your own grief and the grief of those closest to you.

No one wants to feel that they’re being pushed over the edge with nothing there to catch them. Most people would want someone to help them, one who is really present, who has time to hear their concerns. Who has resources they can refer them to. Who has the chance to exercise their greatest skill – compassion.

"Dentists don’t fix their own fillings. We all need to go to others for support and help.”

It’s nearing the end of the session with Restoring Hope. The Santa Claus parade has long gone by, and a group is beginning to gather in an adjacent room to set up for a different event. Tables are being unfolded, and chairs scrape loudly across the floor. One of the social workers gets up to close the doors all the way, shutting out the noise.

Rocheleau walks over to her purse and takes out a small square of plastic. It’s a children’s toy, meant to look like a fish tank; colourful bubbles are pressed in between the plastic panes. When she turns it upside down the bubbles descend slowly, like sand in an hourglass. “This thing takes about sixty seconds,” she tells the group.

She goes on to explain that after failed attempts at what the internet deemed “self-care," she developed it as a coping mechanism that could be incorporated into her hectic days. After a difficult interaction with a client, or a frenzied few days of not being able to take a lunch break, she’ll bring out the device, place it on her desk, and watch the bubbles float. She’ll take measured breaths. She’ll remind herself that she can’t fix everything.

This is part of what Rocheleau teaches the social workers she sees – “self-compassion”: a more realistic version of self-care. It’s about accepting that it’s okay to be affected by difficulties in the work. That it’s okay to not have it all together, all of the time.

She returns to the PowerPoint behind her to review the subject of the workshop: Low-Impact Debriefing, or LID. It's a method for talking through something difficult in a way that’s constructive on both ends of the conversation. The core components, one slide explains, are four questions: “Who can I talk to, when can I talk, where, and how?”.

She’s teaching the social workers how to be heard, and how to prepare others to listen. She says a key part of it is describing what happened to you specifically; how something made you feel and why it affected you, not just the issue the client was having.

With the tide of need still rising and the future of how social workers will be supported uncertain, this is a strategy for the now. Debriefing with a co-worker, because a manager might not have the time, or might not be there at all. Sharing with someone who understands, because few people do. Because the issues are complicated and hard to talk about. While change from the top down remains slow and indeterminate, this is a battle tactic for the everyday trenches.

Social workers often focus on the immediate: what has to be done, who needs help. Rocheleau knows this, so she tells the people from Restoring Hope to remember to think about themselves, too. They, like many social workers, are not always good at that. They’re used to saying, “How are you?” without expecting to be asked the same thing in return. They’re used to advocating for others, rather than for themselves.

One of the last points on the slide offers advice on how to approach this problem. It reads: “Don’t forget about yourself in the story.”