Why Mental Health Isn't the Full Story in Veterinary Wellbeing

written by Angie Arora, MSW, RSW, Veterinary Social Worker & Founder of Arora Wellness

Beyond “Mental Health”: Why the Current Lens Falls Short
In veterinary medicine, we often talk about professional wellbeing in terms of mental health. While that's important, it misses the bigger picture. It strips away the context of the environments where people work and live, overlooking the broader, systemic issues that deeply affect veterinary professionals.

After nearly two decades working as a social worker alongside animal care providers in hospitals, shelters, and wildlife and conservation organizations, I’ve come to see the landscape clearly: this work is not just high-stress, it is trauma-exposed by nature. And when we treat it solely as a matter of individual “mental health,” we miss the full story.

Let’s be honest about what that looks like.

Understanding Trauma Exposure in Veterinary Settings
In veterinary medicine, trauma can take many forms. It might be the sudden and unexpected loss of a patient on the table or a euthanasia that doesn't go as planned that leaves those impacted overwhelmed. In shelter medicine, it can be witnessing and responding to systemic inequities impacting the wellbeing of animals and their families. In wildlife and conservation, it can be the gradual grief of witnessing ecosystems decline or releasing animals into habitats with no certainty of their future.

This isn’t occasional or isolated. It’s repeated. Cumulative. Often unspoken. And when there’s no structured way to process it, no culture of acknowledgment or support, it doesn’t just go away. It gets absorbed. Internalized. For many, especially those with a history of complex trauma, the impact becomes deeply embedded into our core belief systems, sense of safety and worldviews.

The Cost of Caring Without Recovery
And the pace of this work leaves little room for recovery.

Most animal care settings demand constant presence, perpetual readiness, and emotional availability without pause. The nervous system is continually activated, and when the stress response cycle isn’t completed—when we don’t get a chance to come down—it becomes chronic. Over time, that chronic stress builds into exhaustion and even detachment; not a detachment from the mission, but a detachment from feeling. For others, it can lead to hypervigilance where we can get stuck in loops of rumination and 'over feeling'.

This is where the “mental health” framing falls short.

When Systems, Not People, Are the Problem
It’s not that mental health isn’t important or that it's not impacted—it absolutely is. But when we center the conversation solely on individual mental health, we decontextualize the challenges. We quietly imply that the distress is a personal shortcoming rather than a predictable response to the conditions we’re working in. And we obscure the very real systemic forces that shape those conditions.

The way many of us have been taught to think about mental health also obscures how other facets of our wellbeing are impacted–our physical health, our nervous system health, our emotional health, our social health, to name a few.

The Impact of Inequity on Veterinary Professionals
It’s not just trauma and pace—it’s also inequity.

Many professionals in animal care, especially those from marginalized and systemically-excluded communities, carry the compounded weight of discrimination, bias, and systemic exclusion. Whether it’s the racism experienced by Black, Indigenous, and racialized staff, the barriers faced by professionals who are LGBTQIA+, or the lack of accessibility for team members living with different abilities—oppression adds another layer of harm to already high-stress, trauma-laden environments. These experiences don’t exist outside the workplace; they are the workplace for many.

Reframing Wellbeing: The Professional Quality of Life Model
That’s why I turn to the Professional Quality of Life framework. It gives us a more nuanced, contextual lens.

It includes Compassion Satisfaction—the purpose, joy, and fulfillment we feel when the work aligns with our values. The tail wags. The second chances. The quiet thank-you’s. The moments that remind us why we’re here. And many there are.

But it also includes Empathic Distress—the emotional cost of caring deeply in systems that often don’t have the capacity to hold that care. This distress is shaped by secondary trauma, moral distress, vicarious grief, and burnout. And it doesn’t just affect individuals—it ripples across teams, entire organizations, and even professions.

Holding Dual Truths: Compassion and Exhaustion
We need to stop framing these responses as a lack of resilience. They are, more often than not, reasonable human reactions to unreasonable circumstances.

And we need to recognize that you can experience both.

You can love the work and feel exhausted by it. You can feel purposeful and overwhelmed. These aren’t contradictions, they’re coexisting truths. What one person feels may differ from their teammate, but common conditions like systemic inequity, lack of recovery time, and trauma exposure often shape shared patterns across teams and workplaces.

Shifting the Conversation Toward Systemic Support
So what do we do with all of this?

We start shifting the conversation. From: “Are you okay?”
To: “How is the nature of this work and this system impacting you?”
And even more importantly: “How can we respond to that together?”

Because this work is meaningful. It’s beautiful. And yes, it can be heavy. Not because you’re not resilient enough, but because the systems demand a lot of us—physically, emotionally, and socially. The more we name these truths, individually and collectively, the more we open the door to cultures of care, equity, and genuine, holistic wellbeing.

Let’s start there.

Coming Soon: 

Shifting from Survival: Nervous System Health Foundations