Carers need care too

Sustained exposure to other people’s distress, unrealistic self-expectation and thin social support is unsustainable, explains Ishbel Straker.

I’ve spent years sitting across from professionals, lawyers, doctors, nurses, paramedics and now ministers, and said this: ministry is one of the few roles where a person carries clinical-level emotional weight without clinical-level support.

You hold other people’s trauma, crises and grief, while also regulating your own emotional state, often in real time, often mid-sermon, often with a cup of undrinkable coffee going cold in your hand because someone needed you the moment you sat down.

This is not simply ‘a hard job’. It is a chronic, high-exposure caring role, and it needs to be understood and managed as one, not prayed through on willpower alone, however tempting that is at 11pm on a Saturday.

In most organisations, difficult roles are cushioned by layers: supervision, HR, peer teams, defined hours, and clear boundaries between the person and the role.

Ministry frequently strips these layers away. The expectation of excellence is rarely imposed by a line manager, it’s self-generated, rooted in calling, and therefore much harder to challenge or put down.

This matters clinically. Sustained exposure to other people’s distress, combined with unrealistic self-expectation and thin social support, is a well-established pathway to anxiety, depression and burnout.

It isn’t weakness; it’s a predictable physiological and psychological response to an unsustainable load.

I’ve never once diagnosed a minister with ‘insufficient faith’. I have diagnosed plenty with burnout dressed up as duty.

story continues…