Therapy and coaching for nurses, physicians, and other clinicians.
I offer therapy for healthcare workers in Michigan and Ohio, and coaching anywhere. I have seventeen years in behavioral health, including inpatient psychiatric care and crisis response, and I work with burnout, moral injury, grief, and the rest of life.
Why healthcare workers reach out
You’ve told patients’ families harder things than you’ve ever told anyone about your own life. The chart closes, the next one opens, and the drive home is the only part of the day where nobody needs anything from you. Somewhere along the way the job stopped staying at the hospital, and nobody asked what that costs you.
Maybe what made you look for a therapist was a day off that didn’t help, a patient you’re still thinking about months later, the third time this month you thought about leaving healthcare, or someone at home saying you haven’t seemed like yourself.
If you’ve put off reaching out, part of it may be that you’re used to being the one who helps, and part of it may be wondering whether a therapist would understand your job without a lot of explaining. I spent several years in a hospital system, working alongside physicians and nurses on psychiatric inpatient units and in the emergency department, and earlier I worked as a certified nursing assistant in a care home. I have provided therapy to nurses and other medical professionals since. You won’t have to explain what a code, a double shift, or an unsafe patient load is. More about my background is on the about page.
What I see in healthcare workers
If you’re an ICU or ER nurse, you may be carrying codes that didn’t go the way they should have and family meetings that ran into the next shift. If you’re a physician, you may have stopped sleeping well some time ago and stopped noticing. If you’re a PA or NP, you may be running at the top of your license through staffing shortages that were supposed to be temporary. If you’re a pharmacist, having controlled medications within reach all day may be something you’ve started to think about. If you work in hospice or palliative care, you may have no time to grieve one patient because there’s a new admission tomorrow.
Some call it compassion fatigue, some call it burnout, and some call it secondary trauma. The distinction is in the questions below.
Moral injury is a different injury from exhaustion. The language of burnout doesn’t cover it. It’s knowing what the standard of care is and knowing you can’t deliver it because of how the unit is staffed tonight. A wellness module does not fix that.
You’re the one who handles it: the code, the difficult family conversation, staying steady when the room isn’t. Your unit relies on that, and so does your family. You’re the one everybody calls, and you haven’t asked anyone for help in years.
The shifts keep extending. There are the hours after the shift spent finishing notes, patient ratios that don’t match safe practice, and the 6 p.m. call asking you to stay until 11 because the next nurse called out. What that does to your sleep, your mood, and the rest of your life is not a personal weakness.
Substance use comes up often enough to name directly. It might be drinking, benzodiazepine use that started for a reason that made sense, diversion, or the worry that you’re closer to it than you used to be. I’m a Certified Advanced Alcohol and Drug Counselor (CAADC).
Perfectionism has a cost. There’s the error you didn’t make but almost did, and the error you did make, that nobody else saw, that you haven’t stopped replaying. The goal isn’t to lower your standards. It’s to keep them without replaying every near miss at 2 a.m.
Health care workers as a group have a higher suicide risk than other workers. A 2023 national cohort study found the increase concentrated among health care support workers, registered nurses, and health technicians, while physicians as a group did not show a significant increase. A 2020 meta-analysis found female physicians have a higher suicide rate than women in general. If you are thinking about ending your life, or thinking about it more often than you used to, say so to a clinician who knows the field. If you are in immediate crisis, 988 is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and is appropriate even if you don’t feel like you’re in crisis “enough.” The thought that other people are worse off than you are is one I hear from healthcare workers.
You take symptoms seriously in patients and minimize your own. You’d tell a patient to deal with the thing you’re not dealing with in yourself. Part of what we do together is take what you already know clinically and apply it to you.
Therapy or coaching?
For clinical concerns like active depression or anxiety, PTSD, panic attacks, substance use that has crossed the threshold, or persistent intrusive thoughts, therapy is the right tool.
Coaching is for decisions, performance, and transitions: the jump from resident to attending with no safety net, switching specialty or leaving the bedside for clinic or per diem, going part-time or locums and the guilt that comes with it, a manager or supervising physician who makes the job unlivable, a first NP or PA job with no orientation and a quota, whether to leave the profession, and who you are when the title isn’t the whole of you. Coaching isn’t psychotherapy, and it does not create a diagnosis or a clinical record.
For partners, parents, and family of healthcare workers
They come home, go flat on the couch, and the part of the day you get is whatever the shift left over. In a 2023 study in Mental Health Science of 203 physician spouses, the burnout they saw in their partners was associated with anxiety, depression, and secondary traumatic stress in the spouses themselves. In a 2024 Medscape survey, as summarized by Health Populi, 86 percent of physicians said burnout had affected their personal relationships, 73 percent somewhat and 13 percent a lot. Nobody in that picture is doing anything wrong, and you live with it too.
You may also feel like you’re not allowed to mind. Partnered with a doctor, married to a nurse: people hear it and stop asking about you, because you’re supposed to be the lucky one. Meanwhile, the on-call schedule just ate another weekend. The story from the unit landed at the kitchen table while you were chopping onions, and you didn’t ask for it, and you slept badly on it. And you’ve stopped bringing up the way shifts end in silence, because that conversation goes the same place every time.
Some partners of healthcare workers have a fear they’ve never said to anyone: fear for the worker’s life. Suicide risk in healthcare is elevated (2023 study). On the family side, that can look like watching for changes, counting drinks, asking careful questions and bracing for the answers. That vigilance is exhausting. To be plain about scope: I’m an outpatient clinician, not a crisis service, and 988 takes calls from worried family members too. What I can offer is care for you, including a place to say that fear out loud.
None of this requires a wedding ring. Dating someone in residency counts. Being the parent who co-signed the nursing-school loans counts. Growing up as the kid who learned not to ask about work counts. So does the sibling, or the friend who ends up being the one they actually call. And if you’re reading this at 1 a.m. while they’re on shift, that counts too.
You’d be coming for your own life, not to manage theirs from the next room.
Questions healthcare workers ask before reaching out
Short answers below. Anything not covered here can go on the contact form.
Yes. PAs, NPs, RTs, pharmacists, techs, aides, therapists, social workers, chaplains: if the job is healthcare, you’ll probably recognize more of this page than you’d like, whatever your title.
If you’re EMS, the first responders page may also fit.
These overlap and the language is still evolving. A working distinction:
Burnout is the depletion that comes from chronic workplace stress, often described in terms of exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced sense of effectiveness. The World Health Organization classifies it as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition.
Compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress describe what happens when sustained exposure to other people’s suffering leaves you with symptoms that resemble the people you care for. Intrusive images. Numbing. Sleep disruption. A loss of the ability to feel for patients you used to feel for.
Moral injury, as Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot have written about it in healthcare, is the specific wound of being repeatedly required to act against your values: discharging a patient you know isn’t ready, watching care decisions made by people who never met the patient, being unable to provide the standard of care you trained for, being asked to absorb the gap between what the system says and what the bedside actually requires. It often looks like burnout from the outside, and some of the symptoms overlap, but the source is different and so is what helps.
Many healthcare workers carry pieces of all three. The treatment looks different depending on which is dominant. Burnout often responds to changes in load and recovery. Compassion fatigue and secondary trauma often need targeted clinical work on the material that has gotten under your skin. Moral injury tends to need something else again: a place to say what you have seen, name what you have been asked to do, and figure out what you do next given what you now know about the system you work in.
Yes. A number of the people I work with are therapists, social workers, nurses, physicians, PAs, NPs, pharmacists, and other clinicians.
Working with another clinician has some specific considerations: the urge to perform competence, the difficulty of being in the other chair, the worry that disclosing distress will leak into your professional reputation, the experience of having your symptoms read through your own clinical training and finding it harder to take them seriously. Those are part of what we talk about openly.
I won’t coach you on your own clinical work or supervise your cases. If you want that, it’s a separate professional relationship with someone else. As your therapist, I will treat you the way I treat any other person who comes in.
It depends on your state and the exact wording of the renewal question, and that wording has been changing. The current direction across many boards, pushed by the Federation of State Medical Boards, the AMA, and the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation, is to ask only about current impairment, not about treatment history. A 2021 review of medical licensing applications in all 50 states and the District of Columbia found that most, 39 of 51, asked about a mental health condition only if it impaired your ability to practice.
As of January 2026, the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation lists Michigan as verified across the four professions it audits (medical, nursing, pharmacy, and dental), meaning those boards’ renewal applications have been checked and found free of mental health diagnosis and treatment-history questions. The State Medical Board of Ohio has removed its historically intrusive mental health questions and routes concerns through a Confidential Monitoring Program. Questions about current impairment remain.
Read the actual form your board sends you, word for word, every renewal cycle, and read your hospital’s credentialing application too, since it sometimes asks more than the board does. If you aren’t sure how to answer, a healthcare attorney is the right resource. I don’t prescribe, so medication is between you and your prescriber.
Substance use disorder is treatable, and it is something I treat directly. If what we find together is an active substance use disorder, the right path is more comprehensive treatment than weekly outpatient therapy.
I am not required to report you to your licensing board, in Michigan or in Ohio, and what you tell me about substance use has the same confidentiality as the rest of your file.
If you tell me you’re diverting medications or practicing impaired in a way that puts patients at immediate risk, that is a different conversation, and we have it together. The goal is a path that protects patients and gives you a realistic route forward.
Most states run a health-professional program. In Michigan it is the Health Professional Recovery Program (HPRP). In Ohio it is the Ohio Professionals Health Program (OhioPHP). Both exist as confidential alternatives to discipline for substance use, mental health, and impairment concerns. Self-referral has license implications, so talk with a healthcare attorney before making it. Voluntary self-pay therapy that is not impairing your practice does not route through these programs.
Yes. Your own life is the client here: therapy if you’re in Michigan or Ohio, coaching wherever you are. Living with someone in healthcare reshapes your life, and your life is worth clinical attention in its own right.
What I don’t offer is a role where you become responsible for the worker’s treatment. If they need help, that decision stays theirs.
Resources
If you’re in immediate danger, start with 988. The rest are peer support, advocacy, and the state programs named in the Q&A.
Call or text 988. Free, confidential, 24/7, including for worried family members.
1-888-409-0141. Free, confidential peer line for physicians and medical students, staffed by volunteer psychiatrists. Weekdays 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern.
Peer-support community with virtual support groups for nurses and other healthcare workers, donation-based, with no one turned away.
Advocacy and resources on healthcare worker wellbeing, including which states and hospitals have removed intrusive licensure questions.
1-800-453-3784. Michigan’s confidential, non-disciplinary program for licensed health professionals. See the Q&A above before self-referring.
(614) 841-9690, with a dedicated nurses line at (614) 600-3075. Ohio’s confidential program for licensed healthcare professionals.
Directory of state physician health programs.
State-by-state lookup of non-public monitoring programs for nurses.
Schwartz Rounds and caregiver support programs.
Checked July 2026, and re-checked at least annually. Board and program rules change; the form your board sends you is what counts.
What working with me looks like
Reaching out starts with the contact form: a few questions, then your first name and email. I reach out within 48 hours with a link to book a free 20-minute call, by phone or video, before anything is scheduled.
Fees are on the therapy and coaching pages.
If you are in acute crisis right now, weekly outpatient therapy is not the right level of care. The right next steps are 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, your nearest emergency department, or a crisis line through your state-specific physician or nurse health program. We can talk about ongoing care once you are stable.
This page is general information, not legal advice. Board rules, monitoring programs, and employer policies vary and change. For your specific situation, ask your board, your program, or a healthcare attorney.