Nobody Warned Me It Would Feel Like This
- vetspawspective
- 17 hours ago
- 4 min read
A personal account of mental health in veterinary practice — and why we need to talk about it more honestly.
I remember the exact moment I realised something was wrong.
It wasn't a dramatic breakdown. There was no single case that broke me. It was a completely ordinary, and I was sitting in my car in the clinic car park for twenty minutes before I could make myself go inside. I wasn't sad exactly. I wasn't panicking. I just couldn't move. I sat there staring at the steering wheel, running through every appointment on the schedule, and feeling — nothing. A kind of grey emptiness where the motivation used to be.
I'd been a vet for years at that point. I was good at my job. Nobody would have guessed.
That's the thing nobody warns you about. It doesn't arrive all at once.
It builds slowly
Veterinary burnout doesn't tend to announce itself. It accumulates. It's the grief of a euthanasia that you carry into the next appointment without time to process. It's the client who screams at you over a bill after you've just saved their animal's life. It's the moral injury of knowing what the right treatment is and watching someone choose otherwise because they can't afford it. It's being the strong one, every single day, for every single person who walks through your door in crisis — and then going home and being expected to be a normal human being.
We absorb a lot. We are trained to absorb it quietly.
The problem is that quiet isn't the same as fine.
We're not good at asking for help
Veterinary culture has a complicated relationship with vulnerability. We are scientists and problem-solvers. We are used to being the ones with the answers. Admitting that we're struggling feels — at least it felt to me — like a professional failure. Like if I couldn't hold it together, maybe I wasn't cut out for this.
So I held it together. Visibly. And quietly fell apart in the margins of my life — in the car park, on a day that should have been like any other.
I didn't tell my colleagues. I didn't tell my family, not really. I told myself it was just a rough patch.
It wasn't a rough patch.
What I wish I'd done sooner
I wish I'd talked to someone earlier. Not a friend, not a colleague — a professional. Someone outside the bubble of veterinary practice who could hear what I was saying without it becoming workplace gossip, without them minimising it because they were carrying the same thing.
I wish I'd understood that being exhausted by this job isn't weakness. It's a reasonable response to an unreasonable amount of emotional labour performed under significant pressure, often for insufficient pay, with very little acknowledgment of what it actually costs you.
I wish someone had said to me, plainly: the suicide rate in our profession is significantly higher than the general population. That we lose colleagues to this. That it is not a personal failing — it is a systemic problem that we have been too polite, too stoic, too professional to address properly.
The industry is starting to talk about it
There are better conversations happening now than there were ten years ago. Mental health resources specific to veterinary professionals exist. Some workplaces are genuinely trying. Vet schools are beginning to address resilience and wellbeing as part of the curriculum rather than an afterthought. Organisations like Sophie's Legacy are bringing up the conversation with the public.
But we are not there yet. Not even close.
Because talking about it in a webinar once a year is not the same as building a culture where a vet can say I'm not okay today without worrying about what it means for their career. Where a practice owner can acknowledge that their team is struggling without it feeling like an admission of failure. Where we treat the people who care for animals with the same urgency and compassion we extend to the animals themselves.
What I want you to know
If you're sitting in your car before a shift, if you're running on empty, if you're going through the motions and hoping no one notices — I see you. I've been you.
It does not mean you're bad at your job. It means you care enormously, and caring enormously without proper support is not sustainable for anyone.
Please talk to someone. A GP. A psychologist. A helpline if that feels safer than a face-to-face conversation. Tell one person the true version of how you're doing.
You got into this profession because you wanted to help. You are allowed to be helped too.
Have you experienced burnout or mental health challenges in your veterinary career? I'd love to hear from you in the comments — the more we share, the less alone any of us has to feel.
If you're struggling, please reach out to a mental health professional or contact a helpline in your country.
Australia
Lifeline:
13 11 14
The Veterinary Benevolent Fund and similar organisations also offer profession-specific support.
New Zealand
Lifeline NZ:
0800 543 354
USA
988
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