Beyond Self-Care: Holistic Approaches for Preventing Burnout and Promoting Flourishing among Helping Professionals

The helping professions have always been challenging but during and following the pandemic we have seen troubling levels of burnout, vicarious trauma, and diminished well-being among those providing mental health and spiritual care (e.g., mental health professionals, clergy, and chaplains). Self-care is frequently invoked as a solution for these problems. But the “self-care solution” does not address the systemic, relational, and existential dimensions of the profound challenges in this work. This conference will offer a call for a paradigm shift “beyond self-care” to offer holistic understandings and approaches for preventing burnout and promoting flourishing among these helping professionals. A diverse and interdisciplinary team of presenters and panelists will engage recent research findings on these issues and propose constructive strategies through a multi-dimensional framework that is systemic, relational, psychosocial, and existential-spiritual. Attention will be given to both common and unique challenges across mental health, clergy, and chaplain vocational contexts. The morning presentations will outline the contours of our holistic framework based on theory, research, and practice. The first two afternoon sessions will bring relevant research findings on two often-neglected sets of systemic considerations impacting burnout and flourishing among helping professionals (i.e., diversity and justice, couple and family dynamics) into dialogue with a panel of experts. The final main session will illustrate a live group process with helping professionals reflecting on applications from the prior sessions and based on a novel formation-based group intervention program that has shown promising outcomes (Captari et al., 2024). This conference will assist mental health professionals (psychologists, social workers, and others), clergy, and chaplains toward improving their own professional well-being, thereby strengthening their service to the public, as well as informing service to patients or congregants who are caregivers.