The Season of Surviving the System

By Sabrina Hadeed, PhD, LPC

November 2025

As a counselor, I’ve always noticed seasons in my work — quiet lulls in summer, emotional surges in winter, back-to-school resets in fall. The emotional rhythms of the seasons often show up subtly but consistently in client sessions. Lately, however, the seasons aren’t just emotional. They’re economic. Existential. System-induced.

Want to understand the cultural pulse of a struggling society? Ask a counselor what they’re seeing in session.

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a shift — one that’s deeper than seasonal mood changes or post-holiday blues. The stress my clients are bringing in isn’t just personal; it’s structural. They’re talking about rising rents, job loss, straining child care costs, medical debt, burnout and the quiet terror of not knowing how much longer they can hold it all together.

The counseling room is a microcosm of a world buckling under the weight of late-stage capitalism, fractured support systems and social contracts that no longer hold. The pressures are mounting. And for some people, the world is starting to feel increasingly unsustainable. In nearly every session, I’m hearing versions of the same quiet confession:

“I can’t afford to come as often as I need to.”

“We had to choose between our kid’s gymnastics class and groceries.”

“I’m working harder than ever and still falling behind.”

These struggles aren’t isolated. They’re data points in a larger, more painful story — one that’s becoming harder to ignore.

Just the other morning, I opened my phone to see news of yet another beloved local restaurant closing. It was another sign that rising costs are swallowing cherished parts of our communities. That same day, I received yet another email: Office lease rates were increasing — again. Such messages often come from business owners who are also just trying to hold it together.

The collective pressures are mounting everywhere, from kitchen tables to counseling couches. We’re witnessing a mental health crisis deeply intertwined with economic instability, political disillusionment, climate dread and a fraying social fabric. And yet, the dominant solutions offered remain individual: “meditate more,” “budget better,” “be grateful.”

But when your nervous system is in constant fight-or-flight because your rent jumped $400 overnight or child care now costs half your paycheck, “self-care” becomes a hollow phrase.

The New Frontlines of Counseling

The counseling room is a frontline for grief about the world — not just personal trauma, but systemic overwhelm. Here is some of what I’m seeing:

• Middle-class families making impossible trade-offs: People who might once have felt financially secure now have to choose between groceries or kids’ sports lessons, housing or health care.
• Young adults frozen by student debt, housing insecurity and climate dread: People are feeling unsure how to build a future when the ground beneath them keeps shifting.
• Educators, nurses and frontline workers facing moral injury: People feel burned out not just by their workloads but by systems that devalue their labor and integrity.
• Neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ clients struggling to access affirming care: People feel disadvantaged by systems that demand conformity over authenticity.
• Immigrant and first-generation families balancing survival and fear with legacy: People are carrying the weight of both generational sacrifice and systemic exclusion. 

These stories don’t fit neatly into diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision™ (DSM-5-TR). They are rational responses to irrational systems. They are the reason the DSM-5-TR includes “adjustment disorder.” But is it a disorder at all, or a natural reaction to the challenges of simply surviving?

In addition, conditions inside community mental health are pushing providers out. Associates are less willing to stay in underpaid, overstretched environments with high turnover, chronic understaffing and unrealistic productivity demands. If we care about access to care, we have to invest in care — at every level. That includes the people providing it. The solution is to improve the system with fair wages, sustainable workloads and genuine respect for the labor it takes to offer quality care in a world where mental wellness is harder and harder to maintain.

From Isolation to Interconnection: Rethinking How We Heal

If counseling is to remain relevant — and revolutionary — we must keep zooming out. This doesn’t mean abandoning personal work. It means expanding it. Healing doesn’t just happen inside the individual psyche. It happens in the relationships we repair, the roles we unlearn and the communities we cocreate.

Our current model — one person, one counselor, one diagnosis — isn’t just outdated. It’s a product of capitalist logic that treats mental health as something treatable only once it’s broken. Imagine if dental insurance only kicked in when you needed a root canal. That’s how we currently treat our psyches.

What if mental health followed a preventive model, like a regular dental cleaning? What if insurance covered community circles, breathwork sessions, grief rituals, parenting groups and feminist consciousness-raising work?

People don’t heal in isolation. We heal in relationship and in community. Let’s normalize group healing spaces as frontline care, not fringe extras. Let’s demand that our systems recognize what’s long been true: Trauma is often social in origin, and healing must be social in practice.

What a Sustainable Mental Health Ecosystem Actually Looks Like

When we talk about sustainability, we often think of the environment or the economy. But what about the sustainability of mental health care itself?

Right now, access to care hinges on a model that pathologizes people in order to treat them. It rewards overwork, underpays providers and treats healing as a private, commodified act rather than a public good. That’s not sustainability; that’s survival mode.

What would it look like to build a truly sustainable mental health ecosystem? One rooted in equity, prevention and collective care? Here’s what that could include:

• Preventive care models covered by insurance: Think emotional hygiene the way we think dental cleanings, instead of waiting for a crisis to intervene.
• Group- and community-based offerings as legitimate, reimbursable care: Healing circles, grief rituals, parenting groups and somatic workshops should not be luxuries; they should be essential infrastructure.
• Sliding scale and low-barrier entry points: Counselors should not have to choose between making a living and offering accessible care. Sustainability includes economic sustainability for providers, too.
• Public investment in clinician well-being: Such investment means caseload caps, earlier student loan forgiveness and fair wages for community mental health workers, not just more productivity demands in already broken systems.
• Redefining care away from diagnosis-only models: Many people don’t need a label. They need support, reflection and connection. A sustainable model treats suffering as part of the human condition, not a billing code. 

Mental health care should not require a crisis to be valid. Sustainability means creating systems that make care more possible, not more pathologized. Doing so starts with unlearning the idea that people must be broken to be worthy of help.

If you’re reading this article and are in a position of leadership, I hope you’ll ask not just “How am I coping?” but “What am I replicating or resisting?”

If you’re in counseling, ask your counselor to hold space for the bigger picture, not just your personal reaction to it.

If the feelings of overwhelm resonate with you right now, you’re responding appropriately to a world that is.

Let’s not pathologize our pain. Let’s listen to it. It may be the most honest guide we have in this season of unraveling and rebuilding.