You Can't Pizza Party Your Way Out of Burnout: Moral Injury, Compassion Fatigue, and Treating Healthcare Workers - An Interview with Kimberly Johnson, PhD, LMHCD, and Lucy Li, MD

You Can't Pizza Party Your Way Out of Burnout: Moral Injury, Compassion Fatigue, and Treating Healthcare Workers - An Interview with Kimberly Johnson, PhD, LMHCD, and Lucy Li, MD

Kimberly Johnson, PhD, and Lucy Li, MD, of the Emotional PPE Project on healthcare worker mental health and moral injury.

Curt and Katie talk with Kimberly Johnson, PhD, LMHCD, a counselor educator at Touro University with more than thirty years of clinical experience in trauma, crisis, and disaster mental health, and Lucy Li, MD, a pediatric anesthesiologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Both serve on the board of the Emotional PPE Project, a volunteer-run nonprofit reducing the barriers that keep healthcare workers from accessing mental health care.

Healthcare workers rarely arrive in therapy looking the way the distress would suggest. They mask, they overcompensate, and they spend session time explaining the job before they get to what the job has done to them. Kimberly describes the trifecta therapists often flatten into ordinary workplace burnout: burnout, compassion fatigue and complex trauma, and moral injury braided together, frequently presenting subclinically. Lucy describes the same terrain from inside medicine, including what shifted for her after her friend and co-resident died by suicide during residency.

They also walk through the Emotional PPE Project's directory of volunteer therapists and its ePPE 101 training for mental health professionals who want to work with healthcare workers well.

In this episode, we discuss:

- Why healthcare workers are a heterogeneous population, not a single clinical profile

- How burnout, complex trauma, and moral injury show up together and subclinically

- The intake questions that surface occupational risk factors early

- Why moral injury sits where occupational, vocational, and personal identity stop aligning

- What stigma costs healthcare workers, their patients, and the workforce

- How the Emotional PPE Project connects healthcare workers to free, confidential care