Mini-story: Burnout

“At least I have a job,” he said. “There’s a lot of unemployment these days.” “That’s true, but it doesn’t mean you have to pretend that your job is perfect,” the therapist replied. Her name was Dr. Weston, and she’d had her own practice for just over eleven years. She helped patients from all walks of life with any number of issues, including substance abuse, grief, marriage counselling, emotional trauma, stress and depression, and considerably more. Her approach was always bespoke, making no assumptions about the source of each patient’s difficulties, or which therapeutic method would be most effective for them. This particular client was one of her most interesting. She knew him only as Daniel, and she was about ninety-nine percent certain that the name was made up. He’d never given a surname at all, and her secretary reported that he paid in cash, monthly in advance. He had never missed a payment by so much as an hour. She had been helping him for a few weeks now, yet most of his…