We want to promote and spread awareness for people in the helping professions to freely seek mental health services and minimize the shame and stigma attached to it. We need our government to prioritize this concern through allocating more funding to mental health awareness. This in turn supports ND agencies so they can better implement guidelines and protections that create a safe space for these professionals to seek help when they need it the most.

This petition strikes a personal chord, born from a heartbreaking tragedy. A sister, a nurse, struggled silently with her own mental health. Her fears of reaching out, and seeking help, were rooted in the perceived threat of losing her nursing license. To our profound sorrow, she lost her battle during a mental health crisis. This loss drives our urge to act. To prevent similar tragedies, we must ensure that those in helping professions can seek and obtain mental health services without fear of career-ending consequences.

As a mental health advocate, a teacher, and mental health counseling graduate students, we witness the impacts of stress and burnout in our professions every day. We are acutely aware of the risk of developing secondary post-traumatic stress, a condition that often affects people continuously exposed to traumatic stories or incidents, like us and our colleagues.

Further compounding our concerns is an alarming statistic from the Journal of Traumatic Stress (Regehr & LeBlanc, 2017) which reveals that one in four emergency service professionals, a helping profession, are at risk of PTSD. Concurrently, nurses, according to an NIH study (Davidson & Zisook, 2020), have a 1.6 times higher susceptibility to suicide than the overall population.

It is clear that a dire need exists for professionals in these fields to have access to mental health services, including addiction treatment, secondary post-traumatic stress treatment, and suicide prevention programs. We cannot afford to lose more professional helpers to the ailments they fight daily to caring for their patients/clients.

We want to promote and spread awareness for people in the helping professions to freely seek mental health services. We need our government to prioritize this concern by implementing guidelines and protections that create a safe space for these professionals to seek help when they need it the most.

Together, we can ensure that no professional has to choose between their own mental health and their career. Let's make mental health a priority. Please, sign and share this petition.

References
Regehr, C., & LeBlanc, V. R. (2017). PTSD, acute stress, performance and decision-making in emergency service workers. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 45(2), 184-192. https://doi.org/10.1037/XXXXX

Davidson, J., & Zisook, S. (2020). National study confirms nurses at higher risk of suicide than general population. WORLDviews on Evidence Based-Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wvn.2020.02.003