Reader,

One sentence has been lingering for a while now:

Burnout has been individualized instead of politicized.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to explain why so many clinicians leave burnout conversations believing the problem lives primarily inside themselves.

We’re told burnout means we need better boundaries, better self-care, better time management, another training, a vacation, or a mindfulness practice. And to be clear, many of those things can genuinely help. Rest matters. Therapy matters. Learning matters. Boundaries matter.

The problem isn’t that these responses are wrong. It’s that they’re often incomplete.

Because what happens when burnout becomes something we’re expected to solve almost entirely at the individual level?
What happens when the conversation ends with resilience, but never reaches the conditions that made resilience necessary in the first place?

If clinicians across different workplaces, licenses, regions, and healthcare systems are describing remarkably similar experiences of exhaustion, moral injury, impossible productivity expectations, shrinking time with clients, and growing administrative demands, then we’re looking at something bigger than individual coping.

We’re looking at systems that repeatedly ask people to adapt to conditions that should never have become normal.

Once burnout becomes individualized, institutions rarely have to examine themselves. The conversation shifts away from funding models, insurance requirements, staffing shortages, productivity metrics, professional conditioning, racism, ableism, colonialism, and the many structures that shape how care is delivered.

Instead, the question becomes whether clinicians are resilient enough.
Whether their boundaries are strong enough.
Whether they have optimized themselves enough.

That is a heavy burden to place on individuals working inside systems they did not create.

Politicizing burnout does not mean denying personal responsibility or suggesting that boundaries, therapy, or rest no longer matter. It means widening the frame.

It means recognizing that many clinicians are experiencing something that cannot be fully understood through the language of self-care alone.

Because oppressive systems often benefit when exhaustion leaves people with little capacity to imagine that things could be organized differently. When all our energy goes toward surviving the week, there is very little left for questioning why surviving the week has become so difficult in the first place.

This is part of what moral injury feels like.

Not simply being tired, but repeatedly witnessing the gap between the care we want to provide and the care the system allows us to provide.

Tell me where you're at with this:

Hit reply and let me know. I read every response, even if I can’t always respond right away, and I’m always grateful for the honesty and reflection you bring to these conversations.

With much liberatory care,

Silvana

​​Liberatory Letters | The Practice of Liberation | Decolonize Your Practice​

PS.
​If these are the kinds of questions you wish you had more space to wrestle with alongside other clinicians, I'd love to have you join me. Community Liberation Sessions are where we think collectively about practicing inside oppressive systems.
​Community Liberation Sessions of August (last one of the year):
​BIPoC clinicians: Aug. 5 — 1pm PT / 4pm ET
​White clinicians: Aug. 6 — 1pm PT / 4pm ET

PPS.
​If you want to go deeper into this questions in a small group container, then Off Script is where we'll go even deeper into the conversations conventional supervision rarely makes room for. Because liberatory practice was never meant to be figured out alone.

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⬆️ Let's connect!