Every May, the world rallies around Mental Health Awareness Month. It's a time filled with hashtags, wellness initiatives, raising awareness of mental health challenges, and friendly reminders to check in on loved ones. While those efforts are important, there’s a group of people who all-too-often get left out of the conversation: the ones who are checking in.
Mental health professionals spend their days holding space for others, offering care, compassion, and support. But who’s supporting them? Mental Health Awareness Month is the perfect time to widen the lens and look toward clinicians, case managers, therapists, and behavioral health staff. Day in and day out, they carry so much, often silently, and mental health issues impact them, too.
May is also a month to support the people behind the care. It’s a time to discuss mental well-being topics like clinician burnout, how we can show up for our teams as part of Mental Health Awareness Month at work, and how tools like Clinical Scribe make the job a little easier.
Why Mental Health Awareness Month Should Include Clinicians
Working in mental health care is rewarding in so many ways, but it also takes its toll. Compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and chronic stress are all occupational hazards for people working in behavioral health. A 2023 study found that up to 52% of mental health practitioners experienced burnout in that year — a number that’s only rising as demand for services grows.
Most mental health awareness campaigns and mental health resources center around patient care. It’s well-intentioned, of course, but if we're going to have holistic conversations about mental health, we can’t leave clinicians out of the picture.
The truth is that burned-out providers can’t give their best to the people they serve. Patient outcomes are deeply connected to clinician wellness, making supporting the mental health care team essential.
Understanding Clinician Burnout in Behavioral Health
If you work in mental and behavioral health, you know the job comes with a unique kind of emotional weight. That weight adds up fast.
Some of the biggest contributors to burnout and other mental health concerns include:
High caseloads
When clinicians are booked back-to-back with emotionally heavy sessions, they don’t have time to catch their breath, let alone process what they’ve just heard. It goes beyond being busy: high caseloads, especially in behavioral health, come with an invisible emotional cost. Over time, that perpetual intensity can wear clinicians down, leading to emotional exhaustion, reduced empathy, burnout, and even physical health problems. If your team looks sharp on paper but seems disengaged or drained in real life, overloaded schedules might be part of the problem.
Emotional toll
Behavioral health professionals are trained to support people through trauma, crisis, and chronic mental health challenges — but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to mental health conditions themselves. Sitting with people’s pain day in and day out will have an impact. Without time, space, or systems to process what they carry, clinicians can become overwhelmed. This emotional fatigue often flies under the radar until it’s too late, showing up as poorer job performance, more absences, or sudden departures. Prioritizing mental health and protecting your team’s emotional bandwidth reflects your organization's compassion for employees while empowering smart workforce planning.
Administrative overload
For many mental health clinicians, the job doesn’t end when the last session does. They’re staying late or logging on after hours to finish documentation, sort out billing codes, or catch up on compliance-related tasks. That level of administrative strain isn’t sustainable, and it’s often what pushes good therapists to leave. When clinicians spend more time in front of a computer than with patients, job satisfaction takes a hit. To retain talent, the leadership team needs to pay attention to caseloads and how much time and energy is spent on menial tasks.
Lack of work-life balance
Therapists aren’t wired to just “clock out” at 5 p.m. The nature of their work — caring deeply, thinking critically, worrying about others’ well-being — doesn’t shut off easily. That’s why creating a culture that encourages real boundaries, stress management, and time away from work is critical. Without it, your team risks chronic stress and disengagement. If your clinicians feel like they can’t step away — whether because of workload, guilt, or culture — that’s a red flag worth addressing.
Behavioral health settings often compound these pressures. Unlike general healthcare, therapists don’t have lab tests or imaging to rely on. It's all rooted in conversation, connection, and observation. Supporting mental health for patients requires deep, sustained presence.
Promoting Mental Health Awareness Month at Work for Your Team
There's value in things like wellness posters in the staff lounge or rotating themes on the bulletin board that are centered around mental health symptoms. But the solutions for mental health support go beyond that.
In celebration of Mental Health Awareness Month at work, here are some practical ideas to take that next step:
- Listen and take action: Ask your staff what they need for mental wellness, then follow through with related mental health initiatives. Use this month as a starting point, not a one-time exercise.
- Protect time for self-care: Even a 30-minute blocked slot for a walk or quiet break can help reset a clinician’s day and promote positive mental health. Encourage employees to find productive self-care activities to relieve stress and address mental health needs.
- Facilitate peer support spaces: Establish regular, informal circles where staff can reflect, vent, and connect. This promotes employee morale and psychological safety with no pressure, just presence.
- Schedule mental health check-ins: Colleagues can engage one another and model vulnerability by asking, “How are you doing today?”
- Offer third-party support: Make sure your team knows how to access employee assistance program (EAP) services or current mental health benefits. Encourage participation to reduce stigma associated with using them.
How ClinicTracker and Clinical Scribe Support Employee Mental Health
The toughest parts of the behavioral health life don't always tie back to the sessions. It’s also the paperwork, compliance checklists, and billing codes that can feel like another language to learn.
Thankfully, features from ClinicTracker help ease this burden. This EHR platform is built specifically for behavioral health, with features designed to reduce stress and take the administrative tasks off clinicians' plates (or at least make them less burdensome).
ClinicTracker helps lower clinician stress and burnout by:
- Automating routine tasks like appointment reminders, compliance tracking, and billing workflows
- Streamlining communication with secure internal messaging, so care teams can stay aligned without having to dig through past emails
- Simplifying documentation, making it faster, more accurate, and less mentally draining
Then there’s Clinical Scribe — an AI-powered tool that’s changing the way therapists chart. Clinical Scribe cuts down documentation time by up to 60%. There's no more toggling between empathy and keyboard shortcuts. Clinicians can harness the power of technology in the background so they can stay fully present in sessions.
Use Mental Health Awareness Month at Work as a Launchpad for Change
Mental Health Awareness Month is deeply rooted in patient care. But it should also be a catalyst for thinking about how to provide your employees — the ones delivering that care — with support too.
Let it be more than a moment, though. Using May as a jumping off point, continue to look for new ways to boost employee engagement and spark permanent changes that offer support year-round.
To make mental health awareness an ongoing priority in the workplace, you can:
- Collect honest feedback from staff about what’s working and what isn’t so you can optimize your strategy and deliver personalized support
- Audit your tools and workflows to find stress points, then create a plan to resolve them
- Invest in systems that boost clinicians’ mental health and employee well-being
Remember: ClinicTracker grows with your clinic, adapting as your needs evolve. It’s not just checking boxes — it’s about building a sustainable, supportive work environment.
Want to get a glimpse of how ClinicTracker supports your employees behind the scenes? Request a demo today.
