Mental Health First Aid for Vets: Looking After the People Who Look After the Animals

From the outside, people see somebody who loves animals and gets to work with them every day. They don’t necessarily see everything that comes with that.

Vets, veterinary nurses and the wider practice team carry a particular kind of pressure. A systematic review of the research found that the suicide rate among UK vets is at least three times that of the general population. In a survey of veterinary nurses by the RCVS Mind Matters Initiative, nearly seven in ten had experienced a mental health concern, but only half had received professional support.

I work as a therapist, and I train workplaces in mental health first aid. This is what I see when I spend time around veterinary teams, and where I think mental health first aid fits.

What people outside the profession don’t see

You’ve got the clinical responsibility. You’re making decisions about an animal that can’t tell you what’s wrong.

But you’ve also got an owner standing in front of you who might be frightened, angry, grieving or trying to make a decision they really don’t want to make. Money can become part of that conversation too. You might know what treatment you’d ideally provide, but the owner simply can’t afford it. So now you’re dealing with the animal, the clinical decision, the owner’s emotions and the financial reality, all at the same time.

Then there’s euthanasia. For the owner, that might be one of the hardest days they’ve had in years. For the vet or nurse, it might be the fourth one they’ve been involved with that week. And they still have to walk back out and see the next patient.

You don’t necessarily get time to process one difficult thing before the next thing arrives.

Then there are complaints. People can be incredibly emotional when an animal is ill or dies, and sometimes that gets directed at the person standing in front of them. Somebody can spend years training, care deeply about what they do, be absolutely exhausted, and then be told they’re only interested in money or didn’t care enough. That lands.

Add long days, emergencies, staffing pressures and the expectation that you just keep functioning through all of it. It’s not simply that it’s a stressful job. It’s the accumulation.

You can care deeply about what you do and still get worn down by what caring asks of you.

When a practice experiences a loss

I’ve seen what happens around a veterinary team when they experience a significant loss. I won’t talk about an individual or the circumstances, because that’s not my story to tell. But I can talk about what I saw around the people left trying to make sense of it.

A loss doesn’t affect everybody in the same way. Some people want to talk. Some don’t. Somebody might cry. Somebody else might throw themselves into work. Somebody might be angry. Somebody might feel guilty and start replaying conversations, wondering whether there was something they should have noticed. And somebody else might appear absolutely fine and be anything but fine.

There’s also pressure to get back to normal, because the practice still has to function. The phones still ring. Animals still come through the door. The rota still needs covered.

The ripple doesn’t stop at the practice door

A vet can become well known in their local community. They might have looked after the same family’s animals for years. They’ve watched the puppy a child came in holding grow old alongside that child. And sometimes they’ve sat with that family on one of their worst days, when it was time to say goodbye. That’s a relationship of sorts.

So when something happens within a practice, you’ve got colleagues dealing with their own grief, shock and questions. But you may also have clients finding out. Families. Children who knew that vet. People walking in and asking about them while the team are still trying to process it themselves.

That creates another emotional load. The team are grieving while also being exposed to everybody else’s reaction to the loss.

What support after a loss needs to look like

Support after something significant can’t simply be “here’s a phone number if anybody needs it.”

• Actively create space. For people to talk, and for people who don’t want to.
• Check in more than once. Somebody might be fine on day two and struggling two weeks later.
• Look after the people doing the looking after. There will often be one or two people who naturally hold everybody else together.

Everyone asks those people, “How’s the team doing?” At some point, somebody needs to ask them, “How are you doing?”

Where mental health first aid fits in a practice

I wouldn’t just automatically train all the vets. I’d look at the whole practice. The person everybody trusts might be a veterinary nurse. It might be the receptionist who’s been there for fifteen years and knows everybody. It might be the practice manager, or one of the vets. People talk to people they trust, not necessarily the person with the most senior job title.

So I’d build it in layers:

• Awareness for everyone. Not everybody needs to become a mental health first aider. What I’d like is a practice full of people who notice each other. Level 1 is a four hour course that gives the whole team that foundation.
• Mental health first aiders spread across the practice. People who can recognise a concern, have the conversation, understand risk, know how to respond if somebody talks about suicide and, just as importantly, know where their responsibility ends. That’s Level 2.
• Another layer for anyone responsible for staff. Their role is different. They may have to think about fitness to work, workload, time away, adjustments, confidentiality, risk and what organisational support needs to kick in. That’s where Level 3 or our training for managers comes in.

And we definitely don’t want to create a practice full of amateur therapists.

“We can’t take people off the rota”

I completely understand a practice owner saying that. This is the real world. Appointments are booked, animals need treatment, there are staffing shortages and clients waiting. I can’t walk into somebody’s business and pretend taking three people out for training doesn’t cause a problem.

But I would ask: what’s the cost of never making the time? What does it cost when somebody goes off sick, or an experienced nurse leaves? What happens to everybody else’s workload when you’re suddenly one person down for six weeks, rather than one person down for a day of training?

So let’s be practical. We don’t have to train everybody at once. We can stagger it, work around the rota, and start with the people who need it first.

If we’re too busy looking after the animals to look after the people looking after them, eventually those two things collide.

One thing to do on Monday morning

If I could get a practice to do one thing differently on Monday, it wouldn’t need a course or a new wellbeing policy. Get to know how your people normally show up. Before you can recognise that somebody has changed, you need some idea of what normal looks like for them.

Don’t wait until somebody’s crying in the staff room. Notice the person who’s become quieter. The person suddenly snapping at everybody. The person making mistakes they don’t normally make, staying late all the time, or no longer joining everyone for lunch.

None of those things automatically mean there’s a mental health problem. We’re not diagnosing people. We’re noticing change.

And then ask. Not an HR conversation. Not a form. Just: “You’ve not seemed yourself this week. Everything alright?” Give them enough time to actually answer. And if they automatically say “Yeah, I’m fine,” don’t always leave it there. “Are you sure? You just don’t seem quite yourself.”

Create a culture where asking somebody twice isn’t seen as interfering. It’s seen as looking out for each other.

Questions practices ask us

This article is part of our practical guide to workplace mental health training for UK employers.