When the Room Is on Fire

You probably saw it on your feed this week.

I'm not going to name it specifically — because this post isn't really about that particular thing. It's about what happens to us every time something like it does.

And it does happen. Regularly. The profession gets squeezed — by insurance companies, by platforms, by policy changes, by a system that has never quite figured out how to value what we do — and the squeeze shows up on social media as fear, judgment, absolutism, and a lot of "I told you so."

I've been watching it. And I want to talk about what's happening underneath it — in us, in the collective nervous system of a profession that is, frankly, scared.

This is what collective panic looks like.

Fear-mongering. Judgment. Absolutism. The urge to have been right. The urge to warn everyone loudly. The difficulty tolerating uncertainty or complexity.

Sound familiar? It should. We see it in our clients regularly.

When the nervous system is activated — individually or collectively — it does what nervous systems do. It scans for threat. It looks for certainty. It reaches for control in whatever form is available. Sometimes that looks like rage. Sometimes it looks like withdrawal. Sometimes it looks like going on social media and telling everyone they should have known better.

This is not a character flaw in your colleagues. This is a nervous system response to genuine threat. The profession is being squeezed — has been being squeezed for a long time — and this particular moment cracked something open.

That matters. And it's also worth naming that the cracking isn't always useful.

What fear-mongering costs us.

Here's the honest part.

When the loudest voices in a profession are in panic mode, it has a cost. New clinicians read those posts and absorb the terror without the context. Therapists who are already burned out feel the weight of one more thing. Clinicians who made different choices feel implicitly judged. And the nuance — the actual complexity of what's happening and what options exist — gets lost in the noise.

Fear is contagious. So is dysregulation. And we, of all people, know this.

That doesn't mean the fear isn't valid. It is. The rate cuts are real. The implications are real. The systemic problems in how this profession is valued and compensated are very, very real.

But there is a difference between naming something clearly and spreading panic. Between advocating and catastrophizing. Between saying this is serious and here's what I know and saying everything is on fire and no one is safe.

One of those is useful. The other just adds smoke.

Staying grounded when the profession isn't.

So what does it actually look like to stay grounded right now?

It looks like getting your information from sources, not social media spirals. It looks like noticing when you're reading posts that are activating you and choosing to step away. It looks like having honest conversations with colleagues you trust — not performative ones for an audience.

It looks like tending to your own nervous system before you weigh in publicly. Asking yourself: am I about to say something useful, or am I about to discharge my own anxiety into a comment thread?

It looks like holding complexity. The insurance system is broken and some therapists built sustainable practices within it. Platforms have real problems and they provided access for some clinicians who needed it. Both things can be true. Nuance is not naivety.

And it looks like remembering who you are when things are hard. You chose a profession that sits with people in their worst moments and doesn't flinch. That capacity doesn't disappear when the crisis is yours.

You are allowed to be scared.

I want to be clear: this is not a post telling you to calm down or that your fear is wrong.

The system is genuinely difficult. The economic realities of private practice are genuinely hard. The way this profession is compensated relative to its demands is genuinely unjust. Your fear makes sense.

And — you get to choose what you do with it. You get to decide whether fear becomes fuel for something useful or noise that makes an already hard moment harder.

You've sat across from people in crisis and helped them find the thread. You know how to do this.

You can do it for yourself too.

Dr. Jamie English is a licensed clinical social worker, supervisor, and educator. The DJ English blog explores the inner life of the clinician — the parts of this work we don't always talk about out loud.