burnout

Six Tips for Dental Professionals to Improve Their Mental Health

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Dental professionals face numerous stressors in their day to day work including reimbursement concerns, practice management issues, financial pressures, paperwork demands, uncooperative patients, physical demands inherent in delivering oral health care, and tightly booked schedules. Dental professionals often have personal characteristics like perfectionism and prioritization of others’ needs that in conjunction with the day to day work stressors can lead to dental professionals vulnerable to distress, burnout, and mental health disorders. This stress endemic is discussed in the article “Anxiety, depression, and the impact on dental health care workers,” written by Maria L. Geisinger and Stacey L. Dershewitz appearing in the Journal of the American Dental Association (vol. 153, no. 8, pp. 734-736, Aug. 01, 2022). The article also discusses how dental professionals can improve identifying and preventing mental health disorders. The authors feel that mental health disorders can have … Read more

Improving the Mental Health of Oral Surgeons

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Before on this site mental health of dentists has been discussed and particularly addressing mental health issues early on such as during dental education see for example the posts A Counseling Model for Dental Students, Designing a Predoctoral Dental Curriculum To Help With Therapy Issues such as Stress Management and Suicide Prevention, and Medical Students Are At Risk For Suicide. However, many oral surgeons are still afraid to own up to any mental health issues they may have. This is discussed in the editorial titled “Time to change the narrative” appearing in Oral Surgery in 2018 (vol. 11, pp. 97–97). The editorial discusses how oral surgery is increasing a stressful profession. This is because of increasing threats of litigation along with patients increasing having higher expectations of surgical outcomes. The traits that define a good surgeon are those who put … Read more