Balancing Bite and Brain: Mental Health Care for Dental Professionals

Maintaining mental and emotional well-being is crucial for dental professionals who often face high levels of occupational stress, anxiety, and burnout. Dental care teams encounter various stressors in their daily practice, including business-related, clinical, and working environment stressors. Common stressors among practicing dental professionals include challenges in maintaining a work-life balance, dysfunctional work teams, and insufficient time in their schedules to treat patients. Additionally, dental professionals and students may face challenges such as debt, fraud, family responsibilities, illness or injuries, isolation, depression, burnout, anxiety, loss, grief, and addiction, all of which can negatively affect their mental health.

Described as a state of mental and physical exhaustion, Christina Maslach further defined burnout as a psychological syndrome and, thus, developed the constructs of mental fatigue as emotional exhaustion, negative perceptions and feelings about clients or patients (depersonalization), and negative perceptions of oneself in relation to job performance. In the context of dental professionals providing care to patients, burnout can cause individuals to feel overwhelmed by the demands of their work while feeling disconnected from various aspects of their job. Maslach and Leiter²² proposed that increased detachment from work-related duties may lead to perceiving patients as less than human (dehumanization). This is a result of a lack of empathy, emotional detachment, and a decline in the quality of care for patients or consumers.²²

Despite limited published information about burnout among U.S. dentists, LoSasso et al²⁵ found that 20–23% of dentists experienced work-related burnout in their study. The study also revealed that a higher percentage (almost 58%) of solo and small-group practice dentists reported feelings of job stress compared to those in larger group practices (38%).²⁵ Burnout has significant consequences not only for dental professionals and institutions but also for the patients receiving care.

Hence, acquiring knowledge of available resources, support networks, and mental health services for dental professionals can be achieved through various professional associations, including the American Dental Association, the British Dental Association, the Canadian Dental Association, the American Dental Hygienists’ Association, and the Canadian Dental Hygienists Association. These organizations offer various mental health services, counseling, support groups, and access to online forums or communities where professionals can connect and share their personal and professional experiences. For example, The American Dental Association has launched the State Well-Being Program Directory that provides a list of state personnel contacts for each 50 US states and the District of Columbia. (See the list of Resources in this course to access this directory).