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Four Antiochian Leaders Challenging the Status Quo of Healthcare

For people working in the mental health field, their days are centered around helping other people. Although this desire to help is what draws people to the field, it can also be exhausting. Currently, the mental healthcare sector has a 40-70% annual turnover rate. 

This is one way that treatment that may already be stigmatized becomes harder to access, but there are others. Communities may have biases against seeking help because of treatment models that aren’t culturally competent or treatment itself may carry stigma at the policy level. But having worked in these fields, and seeing how important it is for both individuals and our society as a whole, these four graduates from Antioch’s Graduate School of Leadership and Change are challenging systems of care, for both the practitioners and their patients. 

Self-care balanced with structural support

When Stephanie Fox was first studying to become a therapist in 2007, one of her professors offhandedly mentioned that the average time spent in the field was 18 months. With at least three years of schooling ahead of her, she wondered early on what she would need to do to stay in a field with such high turnover. 

At first, she turned to self-care, looking at what she could do as an individual to sustain herself through long hours, high caseloads, and emotionally taxing sessions. She felt pressure to do this on her own. “If you’re in the work, then there’s this expectation that you are better than human,” explains Fox. “And if you have any of your own mental health needs, that’s because there’s a problem with you.”

This perception wasn’t good enough for Fox. It led to her questioning what could be done at the organizational level to support workers as well. Now her findings from that research help inform her work as Chief of Specialty Programs at a hospital system in Maryland that’s 130 years old. She’s leading the leaders and helping build a system that supports the workforce. She’s asking, “What if we operated more from the standpoint that everyone has needs?” It seems like a simple question, but it’s one that would have a huge impact on the field.  (Read our full profile of Fox on Common Thread.)

Creating space for the whole self

Chanté Meadows was already in a leadership role when she started her PhD in Leadership and Change at Antioch. She runs a mental health clinic where she supervises ten clinicians. She’s given TED talks and teaches at the local college. The mantra she carries with her into each of these spaces is, “Mental Health Matters.” She knows this is true for both patients and the people that serve them.

Therapists, counselors, and mental health practitioners are not isolated from what’s happening in the world. Meadows researched an important question to help her in her own work and challenge the mental health field as a whole – how do Black mental health practitioners navigate the complexity of shared racial and social trauma both personally and professionally? 

But the answers she found could help support a wide range of people with different identities working in the field. “I talk about it for the Black community, but it’s truly everyone because we’re in a day and age where we don’t know when the next mass shooting is going to hit,” Meadows explains. “We all have this sense of this shared trauma. All of us. No one is exempt from it.” 

Meadows’ dissertation shows the connection created through shared experiences matters to people seeking care. What’s often missing in Western therapeutic models is the framework to recognize these knowledges as equally valid and important as other kinds of training. “Traditional psychotherapy leaves very little room for cultural humanity,” says Meadows succinctly. 

As we share more collective trauma as a society, Meadows calls for a reimagining of how clinicians can bring their whole selves to their work, which she supports through her own leadership. Offering space for the practitioners she supervises the opportunity to support their client’s mental health, without sacrificing their own. (Read our full profile of Meadows on Common Thread.)

Better leadership could reduce burnout

William Keating was working at a Clinical Mental Health Center in his home state of New Hampshire when he realized the level of turnover was unsustainable for both staff and patients. These centers provide essential services to the community, ones that private practices can’t, like supporting first-episode psychosis or providing continuous care to people that help keep them out of hospitals or facing incarceration. 

With staff regularly leaving these centers the state’s most vulnerable communities are at risk of losing the services they need to lead more connected and fulfilling lives. Things like overwhelming caseloads and lack of structural support are contributing to burnout, which Keating experienced firsthand. 

Keating saw personal relationships between practitioners and supervisors as key to retention. He calls for managers to have more training in leadership, relationship building, and accountability. It was something that was lacking in his time working in clinics, where people were expected to give their all with very little being put into their own wellbeing. 

It eventually led to Keating working in a private practice. It wasn’t an easy decision. “I miss working with the people, because that passion is still there, even though there’s burnout,” Keating shares. “There is that positive, there’s a sense of community.” Hopefully, more leaders will recognize how building stronger relationships can help reduce burnout in the future. (Read our full profile of Keating on Common Thread.)

Reducing stigma recognizes humanity

As the use of opioids has spread across the United States, it has become one of the defining public health crises of our time. The latest statistics from the National Institute of Health say there are three million people impacted by opioid use in the United States. 

Kathy Eggert says it’s an underestimate. And she’s well-positioned to draw her own conclusions about the scope of the problem. For the last 32 years, she’s worked in the treatment field, most of it at methadone clinics in New Haven, Connecticut. As director of the ATP Foundation, a substance use treatment center, and through her scholarship at Antioch, she’s challenging the stigma around methadone in the hopes of changing policy. (Read our full profile of Eggert on Common Thread.)

Part of Eggert’s work is challenging the internal biases practitioners may have around methadone treatment counselors. Through interviews with 26 providers, she discovered that this social stigma is often projected onto their clients. But she’s also seeing a major change in the field. As more people enter the field with their own experiences of methadone treatment, they’re thinking of ways to work within these inherited policies and still support the humanity of people being treated. 

As Eggert says, “They come with a different lens and can help say, ‘We still have this incredibly difficult regulatory system, but how do I work with this person under this structure and not make them feel marginalized? How do we figure this out together?’ We can and we must do better.”

It’s a sentiment that all four of these Antioch graduates carry forward in their work—the mental health systems can and must do better. For practitioners. For patients. For public health.