Lived Experience as a Protective Factor for Mental Health Workers.

Objective: When clients do not seem to be improving, mental health workers have more negative job attitudes, experience higher levels of client-related burnout, and are more interested in leaving the field. Nonetheless, it is unclear whether all mental health workers are equally susceptible to burnout caused by feelings that their clients are not improving. Specifically, people with lived experience of mental illness are intimately familiar with their own recovery challenges and thus may be less susceptible to this source of burnout.

Methods: To test this possibility, mental health providers (N=179) from a nongovernmental community mental health organization in Australia completed a survey assessing their perceptions of client improvement from treatment, their feelings of client-related burnout, and a range of organizational outcomes (job satisfaction, job engagement, workplace well-being, and intentions to resign).

Results: Moderated mediation analyses revealed that although mental health providers who felt that their clients were not improving experienced client-related burnout, lived experience served as a buffer. Staff with lived experience were less susceptible to burnout associated with perceptions that their clients were not improving from treatment. Mental health providers with lived experience also reported more positive job attitudes compared with providers without lived experience.

Conclusions: Given the high rates of burnout in the mental health profession, future research should examine why lived experience appears to buffer staff from burnout when they believe that their clients are not improving. This knowledge could aid in the development of interventions to boost resilience, engagement, and longevity in the field.