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United States of PTSD
Season One: Mental health concerns are on the rise in the United States. This podcast will look at the influencing factors contributing to the decline of our culture. With the rise of school shootings, political divisiveness, increasing levels of hate, and a chronic war of peoples' rights, we have entered a domestic war that never ends. Our podcast will look at whether this is done by design or is it an abject failure. We will discuss it from a clinical and common-sense perspective. Secondarily we will discuss ways to protect yourself from being further traumatized. Hosted by Matthew Boucher LICSW LCDP (licensed in RI) who has over 20 years of experience working with people who have addictions and trauma with a specialty of pregnant/postpartum women. Co-host Wendy Picard is a Learning and Development consultant with 15 years of experience, lifelong observer of the human condition, and diagnosed with PTSD in 1994.
Season Two: Is joined by Donna Gaudette and Julia Kirkpatrick BSW. Julia is currently working on obtaining her MSW and her LCSW. She is a welcome addition to the podcast.
Season Three: Cora Lee Kennedy provided research and worked as a temporary co-host. Dr. Erika Lin-Hendel joins as a co-host for season 3.
United States of PTSD
S3 E: 15 Field Veterinarians and the Mental Health Crisis in Animal Disease Response
PS: Congress is trying to pass a bill that would prohibit the boycott of the genocidal state of Israel's products. Please contact your rep to tell them to vote against the bill and stop the madness.
H.R.867 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): IGO Anti-Boycott Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
Field veterinarian Dr. Kathryn Cehrs shares her experience responding to avian influenza outbreaks and the devastating mental health toll of mass animal depopulations. Her story reveals a systemic failure in supporting veterinary personnel doing essential but traumatic work in disease control.
• Mass depopulation of poultry farms causes significant trauma to veterinarians and animal care workers
• Minimal training provided to field veterinarians
• Methods used for mass depopulation are often inhumane
• Workers experience isolation and ostracism when requesting mental health accommodations
• A colleague's suicide on the job site led to no systemic changes or additional support
• While veterinarians suffer mental health crises, large egg producers saw a 718% profit surge since 2021
• Speaking out about mental health issues helps create awareness and potentially saves lives
If you're experiencing thoughts of suicide, please reach out for help. No job benefit is worth your life.
National Hotline for Mental Health Crises and Suicide Prevention | NAMI
RI’s Anchor Medical to close in June; roughly 25,000 patients need new doctors | WPRI.com
Country’s Largest Egg Producer Saw Profits Surge 718% Amid Shortage
H.R.867 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): IGO Anti-Boycott Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/no-time-to-die
License code: S4CEQWLNQXVZUMU4
Artwork and logo design by Misty Rae.
Special thanks to Joanna Roux for editing help.
Special thanks to the listeners and all the wonderful people who helped listen to and provide feedback on the episode's prerelease.
Please feel free to email Matt topics or suggestions, questions or feedback.
Matt@unitedstatesofPTSD.com
This podcast is not intended to serve as therapeutic advice or to replace any professional treatment. These opinions belong to us and do not reflect any company or agency.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the United States of PTSD. I am honored to be here today again with Erica and a guest speaker that Erica is going to introduce.
Speaker 1:Hi everyone, Just before we get started and thank you so much for being here, we do have a couple of PSAs, our public service announcements, that England area that they are not yet acknowledging, but they have found more bodies since we last did an episode.
Speaker 2:And I think four of them were found on hiking trails. So just be really cautious and careful. If you are out by yourself, take all the precautions needed. Let people know where you're going. And then the second one is specific to Rhode Island know where you're going. And then the second one is specific to Rhode Island.
Speaker 2:I know I have a lot of Connecticut and Rhode Island listeners that one of the biggest entities for primary care in Rhode Island is closing their doors effective at the end of June, and that's Anchor, which is leaving 25,000 people in the state of Rhode Island without a primary care doctor. I think that's obviously a huge problem, and the waiting lists for primary care doctors now in Rhode Island is roughly about two years to get a physical. This will also translate over to medications, I would imagine. If you're being discharged from a practice, you would have to find somebody to prescribe new medications, and it kind of concerns me. I think we are going to have a very serious problem in Rhode Island.
Speaker 2:So I would encourage everybody to reach out to their representatives and demand that there's an overhaul for the healthcare system in Rhode Island, because clearly it's not working. It's a massive problem and for the mental health providers out there. I think we just need to be aware of the struggles that people are going through and to be cognizant of that. So that is my PSA for the stuff in my area. And now, erica, I will go back to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I thank you, Matt, so much for your collaboration on this and promoting this. So Animal Healthcare Workers Against Genocide is an organization that me and several veterinarians work across the country and other. We have also veterinary nurses, veterinary technicians and other. We have also veterinary nurses, veterinary technicians all people who are involved in animal welfare, animal care, who are working in this space. We are having our first in-person event, One Health Night, at the People's Forum in New York City. It's going to be May 30th. It includes a panel of human and animal health care professionals. This is part of our One Health in Action series, and the panel will discuss how genocide impacts one health and how genocidal regimes create animal suffering to worsen human suffering. So we have speakers who are discussing Palestine, a veterinarian in Gaza and a pediatrician who worked in Gaza, and we are working to confirm speakers who will also discuss the Congo and Sudan. So there'll be information in the show notes and all right.
Speaker 1:So I am so, so honored to be welcoming and introducing our guest today, Dr Catherine Sears. She worked as a field veterinarian and her role is what I would like to describe as like an emergency first responder for animal health in the context of food, animal work and also other things that happen in wildlife and domestic species. So one of those you know like one of those awesome, heroic veterinarians that is going out and making sure that the public and the resources of the public are safeguarded, and right now, the majority of the work for the last two years roughly, but more than that is bird flu. So, just to prepare you all, we are going to be talking about depopulation. These are when there are diseases of significance that are impacted or have been detected on farms that sometimes there is the requirement of depopulating those farms in order to attempt to prevent the spread.
Speaker 1:Now, this has been a tradition of how avian influenza has been responded to. This is a significant disease because it can evolve into a zoonotic disease and it goes around the world through migrating birds. So we are going to put more information on the show notes for you if you want to explore more. So it's not going to be the major theme of this, but it's part of it and a facet about it. So, Catherine, tell us a little bit about your journey as a veterinarian as you stepped into this position, Some of the things that you found to be challenging.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I started to want to work on animal outbreaks, animal disease outbreaks. When I was in vet school at Iowa State, iowa State I worked with the swine medicine education program and on one of their rotations they did an exercise simulating a foot and mouth disease outbreak. They had this big they brought in, like the state vets, and they had this big exercise board where we simulated a disease outbreak and how we would respond with tokens and moving pieces around to respond to an outbreak. And it was a really cool thing to do and I had a lot of fun doing it.
Speaker 3:But then you get out in the field and you find out that dealing with an outbreak as boots on the ground personnel is very different than a simulated outbreak on a board, because when you're directing a piece around, it's not the same as when you're responsible for euthanizing animals with your own hands. And when it gets to the number of animals that have to, I keep saying euthanasia because depopulation depopulation by definition is inhumane because there's no way to humanely kill that many animals in such a short space of time. But I say euthanasia for lack of a better word. So it's when you have to do that and you're the person responsible for it and you're doing it yourself, with your own eyes and your own hands. It's a soul crushing thing to have to do.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. And I also used to work in agriculture with food animal. It was the African swine fever concerns that were top of mind and, historically, pedv that's a coronavirus that kills piglets and these types of events are definitely something that the public is kind of like, shielded from the degree of emotional harm that both the veterinarians that are responding to it and the other, like animal health care workers, are responding to it the barn managers, the people and the and the producers, the people who care for these animals on a daily basis. And it's a very, very highly debated topic. And so, yeah, absolutely I think that so many of us can't even really we can only sympathize with our colleagues who are field veterinarians, who are on the ground, and I think that you're kind of pointing out this big gap between people in the field and people who are not in the field.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and, and the weight of these outbreaks. Um, my case man I I didn't get trained really. I was hired during. I was hired during the pandemic and trainings were canceled due to disease risk for humans. And then the outbreak started and we still hadn't been trained yet. So my training to be case manager was a two hour PowerPoint on YouTube. But they opened up that video saying that when we come in and depopulate a farm, it's so devastating to farm owners that some farm owners end up taking their own life because it's such a horrible thing to have their whole farm depopulated like that. So when you go on a farm to do this, you're carrying the weight of what you're doing to those animals and you're carrying the weight of what it might do to the farmers and what it might do to your colleagues and what it even does to yourself. So it's a heavy weight and there's just not a lot of assistance for those of us who are out there going through it.
Speaker 2:I can't even imagine I mean you called it heavy and I don't even think that's a strong enough word, I mean it's just so, I hadn't even thought about it until you mentioned it that the impact that it would have on the farmers, I mean the responsibility that's hanging over people's heads that are doing that, is tremendous. And again, first of all, you know, to kind of echo what Erica said earlier, I mean thank you for all the work that you did, because you've talked about how this is it's a necessary thing that has to happen, for to protect people right To protect it's just it's wow.
Speaker 1:And and there's always and there's, you know, I think that one thing that has has come up in my conversations with Catherine has been how there are a lot of, there's opportunities to do better right, Just because something is like when we are in a situation that the methodologies that are required in these circumstances have these big impacts.
Speaker 1:I think we owe it to both ourselves and the animals that you know that are part of our food systems, and the people involved in that, like we owe it collectively to each other to do the difficult things as best as we can, and I think that Catherine has pointed out that there were a lot of things that were lacking in this, and you know we could have many conversations about why, whether or not it's like under-resourced under, like under-resourced things that could, you know, potentially continue to get worse, or just like a lack of knowledge and a lack of will from people in leadership positions to understand how we need to intervene to get through something with human dignity and also dignity for animals, which is a conversation that the veterinary medicine is having.
Speaker 3:Ventilation shutdown is flatly inhumane and should not be used. Flatly inhumane and should not be used and the government, you know, does say it shouldn't be used for the most part. But I've seen on this outbreak when when a farm pops off and the virus hits and there's high mortality in a single barn, they were still using ventilation shutdown for that, you know, that specific barn because it was said it was necessary. But this outbreak, at least this specific outbreak at the time, was not spreading farm to farm. So I personally didn't understand why we couldn't have taken an extra day to just get equipment in place to do it better, why, why couldn't we have waited to do it? You know they're none of it's humane, but they're. Ventilation shutdown is the least humane of the methods and it's like I didn't understand why we couldn't wait a day to to do it better, like because it wasn't, it wasn't making a difference to do it just then.
Speaker 2:Catherine, do you mind explaining just because I'm not sure everybody would understand what ventilation shutdown means? Could you just explain what that means?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. When they close all the doors and windows and shutters and vents on a building and they turn up the heat and the animals die of suffocation, asphyxiation and heat exposure. They're exhaled carbon dioxide and heat stroke. It's horrible thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for explaining that yeah, and and like on.
Speaker 3:On the on the depots I was on, we were using co2 gas and co2 gas is can be humane if used correctly. To do co2 as a humane euthanasia, you have to put the animal in. I think it's like no more than 30 percent co2 and you have to put the animal in. I think it's like no more than 30% CO2 and you have to slowly turn up the CO2 so that they're euthanized without ever having the awareness. So the CO2 causes unconsciousness before they ever have the awareness they're dying.
Speaker 3:But on the depopulations I was on, we essentially just like built gas chambers out of whatever we had available, like we like made chambers out of nest boxes and pulled tarps over it and then you just put the CO2 hose inside there with the birds in and you just turn it on full blast so it goes from zero to 100% CO2 as fast as they can and like they know they're dying, they're, they're, they're, they're screaming, they're flapping their wings, they're trying to escape and and you have to stand there and you got to hold that tarp down so they don't escape the gas chamber and it's it, it, it. It's horrible to be the person doing that Um and and to see them dying in that way and um this the disease does. The disease kills um chickens and turkeys at a really high mortality rate, but I was working deep populations on ducks and they don't die at quite a high rate, so it's really really tough when they don't look sick and you have to do this. It's a horrible job.
Speaker 2:I can't even imagine. I think I had mentioned I don't know if you were there for this but I recently had to put one of my cats down. I think even in a situation that's ideal, it's hard to do that when there's like a um, when the cat, when the animal's not showing symptoms, right, but like you know, that there's like something fatal happening, like it's really hard to make that decision once. So I can't. I mean, I have a tremendous amount of empathy for you because I can't imagine how difficult that that would actually be.
Speaker 3:Yeah it, it kills everybody. Everybody in the agency like knows this better than they all told me it kills them too when they were out on D pops it. It kills something inside of them. Everybody who does that ends up having to talk to somebody. But the people on the ground in the field end up going to Depop after Depop, after Depop, until you know it it goes too far. My, I had a coworker take her own life on the job site and, um, it's it's, it's, it's a horrible job and some people reach their breaking point without ever getting the help they need.
Speaker 1:And so I just want to take a we can take a collective breath, because it's always devastating devastating to talk about that when we, when we lose people to, to suicide and um, to be there and lose a colleague, uh, when it's also something that you are experiencing is really like I don't have words for that like I have experienced things that are kind of indirectly parallel, but this is when you shared that with me and agreed to have this conversation.
Speaker 1:I feel like we're doing something by pointing out, if you are a leader and you are neglecting the concerns brought to you by people in the field who are calling out the degree of difficulty and you haven't been in that position for a long time you need to go with them on the field. You need to go and be there and remind yourself of the thing that you are requiring the people under your leadership to do so you can make accurate decisions as a leader, and I don't feel like you experienced that and I'm very sorry, and I'm very sorry that the resources were not available to help your friend before it was before it was too late, like nothing changed.
Speaker 3:nothing changed about our orders. Nothing changed about nothing. You know, her death changed nothing when, when they sent out the email to the agency announcing her death, they spelled her name wrong and it just that little detail, just it killed me that they couldn't even give her the dignity of spelling her name correctly when they announced her death. And then to have no measurable change, like to see that doing this has reached the point that people are taking their own lives. It's harming us this much and still nothing changes it.
Speaker 1:just the futility of it killed me so I want to circle back to this like two-hour powerpoint. Oh yeah, right, that opened with talking about the suicide of farmers, right? So like to emphasize this, right, we know that in this time you were not on boarded about how to respond to mental health crises, how to recognize mental health crises, why they literally say that it's a risk of something like there. To know how do you direct farmers to resources which exist. There are farmer mental health resources that exist explicitly for this reason, right, and additionally, just if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about kind of like this other lack of resources for support, lack of resources for support Like they also never thought about. Well, we've had a loss to suicide and how do we support people grieving their colleague?
Speaker 3:So, yeah, the just the lack of training. I was hired in 2020 and when I quit in 2024, I still hadn't received program disease field skills training, which is considered the core training for every field veterinarian that you're supposed to get within six months of hire. It had been four years and I hadn't received that training. And like that two hour PowerPoint, to be honest, I never got more than 15 minutes into it because I'd watched 15 minutes of this PowerPoint of somebody talking and I'd realized I was thinking about my cat and then I'd start over again and then, 15 minutes in, I'm thinking about my lunch because, like it's, you can't. You can't absorb two hours of information from a PowerPoint. It's not a functional way to learn.
Speaker 2:And if I can add to that too recently, because I just did an online training, because you know we have to do CEUsUs, I'm sure you everybody's a private do the exact same thing.
Speaker 2:And the end of doing the online training, they give you the test that you have to take. And what stands out to me this is the same when I worked in a hospital setting as well. You had mandatories that we had to do where we had to answer questions about disease and fire safety and life safety and all that stuff is you can take the tests at the end as many times as you want because you don't actually fail. So if they're giving somebody the opportunity to do an online training and that's their only method of training them, there's no real guarantee that the person, like you had said, is even going to be able to do it or that they're going to be able to comprehend it. So, but we've set up a system that it's impossible to at least from my experiences it's impossible to fail those things. So you're going to pass, even if you don't watch it like you could have. You know what I mean Like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I will say I was assigned to the job before even receiving the training. Like I was sent to the job, I was on site and I was like, is there any training for this? And they're like, oh yeah, there's that video on YouTube. So, like I was, I was already there, assigned doing the job before I even knew there was training available. It was just like like there was no instruction whatsoever. Here's some forms to fill out.
Speaker 3:Sites is often with one day's notice, which the level of stress is. You know, I it was. It was Thanksgiving. The day after Thanksgiving I was with my family and my phone was blowing up. It was like email after email, after email, and it was just, you know, you were enjoying one brief moment with family and just having those come in. Like you know, the phone, my work phone, constantly going off, um, it, just you know it sent my.
Speaker 3:I was so stressed out and it was. I went back home and I got deployed the next day to go to a depop because, like you often get one day's notice, they'll try to send you. With less, they'll try to send you the same day. I was like I needed a day to like figure out arrangements for my cat, like I can't go with one day's notice without with the same day, but that's how fast they want you to deploy, just like pack up your stuff and go be there right now. And that's a really hard thing to do on top of everything else. To do on top of everything else, I will say, since I've left that job, I have everything on my phone set to silent, because the sound of my phone going off stresses me out so much these days that everything is on silent in my house now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did that too, after I left that position that I was previously in.
Speaker 2:Catherine, would you mind? Because after you had talked about your friend, you had also said that it started to impact your mental health in a way that was going to a dark place. Do you mind talking about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the one-year anniversary of my dad's death was December 1st. My great aunt I found out she died December 2nd and December 4th is when I found out my coworker took her own life. So that was a lot of death right together and there's no system set up to deal with a death in the agency like that. And so everybody was sort of reeling on their own with no idea what to do. And somebody asked me if I was okay to deploy and I said no, I needed a break. And I told them that. And despite that, four days later I was in the middle of a Christmas party at a friend's house. I got a phone call saying I needed to deploy to another duck farm and and I said no, I said I couldn't. I said like I can't do that at this point. I said like I can't do that at this point because this was just too much. I was so this was too much death for me, and so I said no. And when I did that, everyone stopped talking to me, because this is an agency where everybody does their part and as soon as they think you're not doing your part, you get ostracized. Now I mean no matter what we all had going on, no matter how hard it is, like everybody knows. But when I said no, I can't do it, everyone stopped talking to me Like I would send emails saying, hey, can I I begged to help with the outbreak in any other method than Depop?
Speaker 3:I begged to do data entry. Can I upload files than DPOP? I begged to do data entry. Can I upload files? Can I, you know? Can I, like organize supplies? Can I do anything to help respond other than other than DPOP? And I got told no. I got told no, that was that was my only option for helping with the outbreak. Was Depop? I would. I was not allowed to be trained in any other position and I begged and it just sent me to a dark place and I, um, because I couldn't help, because they wouldn't let me do anything with Depop and I can't deal with feeling like I'm not doing anything. I instead volunteered to deploy to North Dakota to inspect the border crossing there because they didn't have a vet.
Speaker 3:And so this was January, it was minus 65. Um, and I was. I was in a. I was not in a good place when I went up there, but I did it to feel like I was being useful and my hotel was 45 minutes from the border because there's not a lot of options for hotels up there, and I would go to the border every morning and then I'd drive 45 minutes back to my hotel and I would sob the entire way. Um, and the hotel had a kitchenette in it and you know, so you could cook, and, um, there was a knife in it that I used to cut cheese and avocados.
Speaker 3:But I spent so much time thinking about that knife and thinking about hurting myself that it's been. It's been a year and a half since then and I can I can still picture that knife vividly in my head. That's how much I thought about that knife in that kitchen while I was there and, like you know, they took me while I was there. They took me off all the email lists. So I noticed myself not getting emails about the outbreak anymore. They sort of took me off all the email lists. I stopped getting emails from any of my coworkers. So you know it, just it. It was a horrible period of my mental health. You know it, just it was a horrible period of my mental health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but that isolation and ostracizing and all that contributing to it.
Speaker 1:It's really distressing to hear about these actions that people take that further contribute to isolation and like not actually answering the need right, like not leaning in with more curiosity to say, like I, this, we know this is an issue. Right, this is a longstanding issue as far as we know, that Depop and doing that work has mental health consequences. That is knowledge. So the fact that they've had this knowledge for a very long time, that they receive the direct feedback they lose staff to it, that there's no methodology, that you had to have creative answers for them, like you had to say can I do this, can I do this, can I do this? Right, where they don't have, like, is there a rotation? Right, that they have, they don't have a design rotation. They don't track on whether or not one person is having all the burden of the ducks versus animals that are actually um more severely clinically ill, rather than being a carrier. Right, like they don't, like I'm, I'm just yeah yeah, there's questions, right, it's like why?
Speaker 3:they just. One of the reasons why is they've never had an outbreak last this long before. The previous outbreaks of avian influenza lasted seven, eight months and then they stopped and they did stamping out like that and they just I think they just expected that this outbreak to end like that, and nobody expected this to be the third year of the outbreak and keep going. And I always felt like once we hit year two and nothing, the same method wasn't working. I thought it was time to change tracks and it didn't happen. So that yeah, yeah. I think everybody was like, well, this worked in the past and it wasn't working like it had in the past, but nobody else knew what to do other than what they'd already done. And I think that was part of the problem in trying to maintain the status of doing everything the same they'd always done, even though it wasn't working. And that was something that was hard for everybody in the field feeling like what you did was futile, that it wasn't working, and having to do it anyway.
Speaker 2:Catherine, thank you so much for being really vulnerable in talking about what you were going through. I think it's a it's a testament to just what isolation can do to people. It brings people to these really dark places and I'm very glad that you were able to get out of that. And for those people out there who might be listening and who have had similar experiences, this is just a reminder that you're not alone in that feeling. Other people can relate to that futility and just how difficult things are. I don't know if this will be worth mentioning, so I'm just going to put this right here and we can edit this out if you want. But I know, because I had looked up I had heard rumblings about like how much, despite all this stuff going on with bird flu and the D pops, that the profit for people, the profit for the industry, has gone up 718% since 2021. Is that worth mentioning?
Speaker 3:I have no knowledge of that. I didn't track the industry, but that wouldn't surprise me. When there is a shortage, of when there is a perceived shortage, people increase prices. My understanding from I don't know if there yeah, I don't know how much of an actual shortage there was versus a perceived shortage, but when there's a perceived shortage, people raise prices.
Speaker 2:There's an article I found from Forbes and I'll put it in the notes, that said countries' largest egg producers saw profit surge 718 percent amid shortage, and that came out in it looks like they're saying that this was since 2021. It came out on March 29th 2023. So what I find really appalling about that is here here you are somebody who is on the ground talking about the lack of services for people who need mental health services because of the, the impact and the intensity of the job, yet the the producers are making a 718 profit.
Speaker 1:Uh, seems egregious at at least yeah, I can speak a little bit to this because this is something that I've paid attention to since COVID and I used to work with pigs and the food sector the food production sector was considered essential, right, so workers had to continue going and, of course, animals need continuous care. One of the big things that happened was that a lot of the meat was being shipped internationally. So it wasn't, and, in addition, the worker safety was highly inadequate. So we had people within meat processing plants. Significant number of those are either immigrants and like mostly not white populations, and these people specifically state the producers and the farmers are not the integrators. The companies making the most profit are not the farmers who are raising the animals, and so, fundamentally, where money is being produced or where most of the profits are happening are on the large multinational level.
Speaker 1:Where I find it to be really frustrating is that there are these veterinary organizations American Association of Swine Veterinarians, there's one for poultry, there's one for dairy.
Speaker 1:Right, I have reached out to some of these organizations asking about their responses. Right, because, in my opinion, there's part of veterinary medicine that is completely absent from the labor advocacy, both for like, for example, our field veterinarians who are experiencing these types of things, as well as workers that are experiencing this, and I'm going to use this moment to say veterinary medicine leadership wake up right. You need to be having conversations about how veterinarians can advocate for workers' rights, not just on the context of field veterinarians, but also of the workers that are associated with our field. That might not necessarily be veterinarians, so that is. There's a racialized issue on that, like veterinarians also have not talked about the fact that we have integrators who are having child labor in meatpacking plants, that we, as veterinarians, are not holding that aspect of business, of which we are a part of, accountable for violations, and this is something that I would like you know, like to see more. So sorry to get on a soapbox, but I think it happens in every profession.
Speaker 2:I think it happens in every profession, like I'm still disgusted by the fact that the NASW has said nothing about genocide, absolutely nothing. Not surprised, disgusted, but I mean mean I think it happens in like every unfortunately, but that that's a whole nother issue, because you know well, even though they're all.
Speaker 1:They're all connected right, because it's all the same issue so, you know, in this, like dear audience, thank you for being here as we talk about something that, like you know, know, with Catherine coming on, I was like this connects to so much right, there's environmental components, because avian influenza is, you know, part of the infectious disease process are from wildlife, right, not even from farm to farm, which I think is a big part of this particular outbreak, and that we want to make sure that we are listening and humanizing the field veterinarians, humanizing the farmers and, overall, like humanizing your workers in the field who are on the front lines. Like so many of so much of what you have talked about, katherine, could be laterally applied to so many other areas of medicine, not just veterinary medicine, but also human medicine.
Speaker 3:Us, when people who are in the field are holding the most burden and the people in leadership are disconnected and I think you see that everywhere- I think a lot of people look at veterinarians and animal health technicians and everybody going out on these deep hops and thinking how could they do this, how could anybody do this?
Speaker 3:But I think if you really think how scary it is to be unemployed especially for some of the animal health technicians I worked with, they'd been with the government 20 years, imagine like, and when people have been with the government, you know you have to be there a certain number of years to get the like good retirement benefits.
Speaker 3:So people like they, you know you don't just have the option to refuse and it's very, it's terrifying for people to think about not having retirement benefits or not having or not having a job in in the way, it's not necessarily easy for somebody whose whole career was being an animal health technician to just up and find another job and so, like I was, I was very lucky in order to be able to leave and and for the people who aren't able to leave to, you know, nobody doing these things actually wants to do them and the how could you?
Speaker 3:I just the the terror of not having a job and not being able to retire or not being able to provide for your children, like that that's what it is? It's not. It's not easy to find another job and at the same time, everybody in their head is thinking like maybe this one's going to end the outbreak, maybe this is going to be the last of it. Like everybody keeps going because they, you know, it feels like at some point it's going to end, and so people just keep going and there's not necessarily an easy out for many people.
Speaker 2:That's a great point.
Speaker 2:When you bring up the benefits, you think about those, because that's what draws people into the jobs in the first place is these, you know these great benefit packages with retirement and healthcare and all that stuff. But that it becomes a trap in the end because you then become stuck. It's like you're almost like an indentured servant on some level. I mean, you had I think you had brought up earlier about like student loan, debt and how sometimes you know part of working in jobs they'll pay off student loans and they'll give you all these benefits and then if you leave, you have to pay it all back. So people get stuck and right now I don't know anybody who isn't financially struggling. Every single person I know is financially struggling and I think anybody at this point in time would be hard pressed to leave a job, no matter how abusive it is, because they're they're afraid of what that's going to look like to be unemployed. So that totally makes sense, catherine, and I'm glad that you mentioned that that's. It's a huge part of what keeps people stuck.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and what got me my leaving was, you know, I was stuck too, but not like actually, I just felt stuck. I couldn't, I couldn't see clearly the thing that got me to leave. I had reached the point where I was so at risk of ending my own life that I applied for reasonable accommodations. And I typed up and I said I, I, I, I, I submitted a request for reasonable accommodations due to suicidal ideation I wanted. My request was to respond to the outbreak in an on-field position and I sent the request to my boss with a note that said like this is my last option, otherwise I have no other option in order to stay in the job. And he sent me a very HR speak email saying well then, you should find another job. And that was definitely the closest I ever came to taking my own life, because there was no compassion there and there was no. Are you okay? There was no, can I help you? Like I just I wanted somebody to care, I wanted my boss to care, I wanted somebody to care that I had reached this point and he didn't. But but in a way, in the end, this saved me because two days I got through that night Cause I was seeing my therapist the next day and I talked to her and then the following day after that I went into the office and I told one of my co-workers about this and I told her all of this and she talked to me about how she had one time had mental struggles and she had taken FMLA and taken time off for her mental health, and how she had also quit the field at one time and worked at Costco, and and so those were all things she had done. But then she asked me another question. She asked me if I had loans, and I'm I'm very privileged to not have loans. And when I told her I didn't have loans, she looked right at me and she said, then why are you here? And and I was like, well, well, benefits, well, leave time. Well, well, you know, I didn't. I didn't have a good response.
Speaker 3:And then I drove home. It was a two hour drive home and the whole time I was driving back I was thinking, yeah, why am I here? And and the whole time I just I could not come up with a valid reason for staying, and I had always thought private practice would be worse. I'm like, oh, I can't do euthanasia. I'm like I, what I'm doing right now is euthanasia, and it's not justified or humane in my opinion. Like, like I was, just like I always thought private practice could be worse, but I am at the point I'm about to end my own life there. There's no like it can't be worse than this. Like I got to try it.
Speaker 3:So I got home and I, you know I applied for private practice jobs and, um, as it's just her, her question, why are you here? Just it, it like reset me. It made me look at it and be like one, I don't have a reason for being here and two, there are other options out there. And I just I didn't realize that and I sort of felt like in the whole conversation, it's like she gave me permission to leave. It's like I hadn't. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's like I didn't. It's like I needed. I needed somebody to tell me I could do it, like I needed permission to leave and in a way, she gave me that permission and so I finally like, okay, I can do it, I can leave.
Speaker 3:And just realizing I can leave just changed everything for me and it's the one thing I you know, mental health is a huge problem in veterinary medicine and I, just the thing I am going to take with me is no matter, no matter how bad it gets, I can leave. There's always. There's always another option out there and it doesn't. And the thing is, it doesn't matter how good the benefit of a job is, it doesn't matter how much vacation leave you get, it doesn't matter how many perks you get. If your job has you contemplating taking your own life, there's no benefit worth that. There's no benefit worth your life. So if that's what your job has you contemplating, you need to leave because there's nothing to stay for. If that's what your job has you contemplating, you need to leave because there's nothing to stay for. If that's what, if that's at the point you're at, and I just didn't realize that at the time.
Speaker 1:I'm so grateful to your friend, who both was someone that you knew you could talk to about what you were experiencing and also that she had the knowledge to help you challenge that narrative. So I just want to remind the audience that you have a lot of power with people in your life. So check in with people, right? If someone says that they're struggling with something, hold space, and if you don't feel equipped, there are resources. Matt, I'm sure that we can come up with some things to put in the show notes and you probably rattle some things off here. Recognize the signs that there is no risk. Just asking people hey, are you contemplating suicide? That you will not make it more likely for a person to take their own life by asking them that question and trying to support them into getting support, getting mental health support, getting support right, getting mental health support. I'm so glad that you have had a therapist through that time and thank you for sharing like this, because this narrative is literally life-saving the tools that people can use literally life-saving.
Speaker 1:As a boss, you don't have to use HR speak alone, you really don't and as a colleague, you don't have to ostracize somebody that is talking about a barrier. Right, and when people use their voice to point out something that is wrong, the act of ostracizing is um is a very big problem and is not okay. So if you experience that and I'm just saying that because I've also experienced that in the past and when you hear someone say something that you know is true, right Avoidance is a natural human behavior, but it's not a good one and it's something that we have to push through and use some courage and compassion towards the people that we are working with. I'm so glad that you're here, I'm so glad that you're my colleague and thank you so much for your vulnerability, your openness, because I really think that just this conversation people hearing it is going to help people and going to help people feel empowered.
Speaker 2:I totally second that and I'm also glad that you had a therapist that you were talking to.
Speaker 3:Mental health is so important and I wonder, catherine, the people that were really unsupportive do you think that they also become victims of the system in some way, like that they're also in that same trap, or no, I am. So I went to the Western Veterinary Conference and I ran into one of my old coworkers there doing outreach and when I had quit I had put a Facebook post up on my on my page about my reasons for leaving. And my coworker I was not friends with on Facebook but when we talked he said he had read the Facebook post and I had outreach from other people I had not like been close to who had outreach. And, um, there, at every depopulation there is a safety coordinator and one of the safety coordinators I had met before reached out to me and thanked me for my post because she said it was an important reminder that safety includes people's mental health and, as a safety coordinator, she was going to be discussing mental health when she was on site health when she was on site and so I, I there are a lot of people out there being affected by this and I think I I'm hoping that I did reach some people and and I know everybody was affected by it and I know even my coworkers who ostracized me were affected by it, and I think, I think some of the mentality is that we're going through hell why isn't she?
Speaker 3:And so, but they don't understand that I was going through hell too, and I think. I think there's this. Yeah, I think there is a lack of understanding of each other. Understanding of each other, that's a problem, but people have reached out and told me they've read the post and they're gonna talk about mental health, more so, I'm glad making waves.
Speaker 1:Thank you for demonstrating the power of words right, the power of the pen so and for being brave too and taking a stand like.
Speaker 2:it takes people like you to make risks, for people to start to change, and it's a really scary thing to do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a scary transition, but I'm glad I made it, I'm glad I'm here and I'm very thankful to the people who got me through that period of time so that I can be here.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much, I think, matt. As far as time goes, I think that this is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's just it's so powerful, like I really I feel like we need to, catherine, I think at some point we need to do a part two to this, because I just I feel like that we just kind of scratch the surface on it.
Speaker 2:You know there's there's so much to talk about and you know, as we had mentioned earlier Erica, just like how many of the systems are also interconnected and impact each other.
Speaker 2:Mental health, you know, in one of the earlier episodes I talked about, if you're, you know, if you're in an abusive relationship with somebody living with them, you can't really work on it until you get out of the relationship. I mean, you can certainly work on safety issues and you can work on, like risk management and all of that stuff, but you can't truly start to process the trauma until you get out of it. But what do you do when the entire culture around you is the abuser? Like every time you leave your house you're being abused by something, and I that's actually one of the reasons I started the podcast was because everything we talk about whether we're talking about veterinarians and deep opera, we're talking about genocide in Gaza, or we're talking about, you know, the lack of mental health services I mean they all kind of come back to the same thing that there's a, there's a systematic failing that's happening, but I think it's by design.
Speaker 1:People are being erased from the equation. Right when we talk about Catherine, when you were talking about the exercise. So, catherine, when you were talking about the exercise, right, so I also sat on in some simulations around African. We use that leadership structure to respond to the crisis of living beings. We have to be very critical about that beings. We have to be very critical about that.
Speaker 1:And you were right, and, as someone that is has a little bit of reputation in the industry from being critical, I'm always delighted to meet another critical spirit who you use your voice in the midst of your most how should I say when you were like threadbare, right, when you were threadbare and at so much risk. You still utilize your voice in the midst of all of that and I want to commend that and I want you to continue to like, and your journey of healing and recovery continue to be grounded in the fact that, even though you were like barely keeping your head above water, that you are also fighting to change the system. You know, like when you shared that in the space that we were when we met, that was the reason why I was like hey, I would, your voice could use more amplification.
Speaker 3:So thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. It's been really nice talking to you too Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thank you for being here and I will put all the stuff that we talked about in the podcast. Thank you, and I hope you come back thank you again.
