Honeybee Collective

We expand mental health access by supporting therapist sustainability and addressing burnout.

We do this by creating experiences which address systems-level burnout through restoration, recovery, and resourcing.

Restoration

Creating opportunities for therapists and care workers to reconnect with creativity, play, pleasure, and identities beyond professional caregiving.

Recovery

Creating culturally grounded spaces for learning and recovering culturally indigenous ways of knowing, recovering a sense of humanity, and recovering from the impact of systems of oppression while supporting others managing the same systems.

Resourcing

Building relationships that support peer consultation, referrals, mentorship, collaboration, and access to culturally informed professional support.

The problem

Self-care in the mental health field, particularly for BIPOC health professionals, is not simply an individual failure, but a systemic one.

Systemic Burnout

Mental health professionals provide emotional, relational, and cognitive care to patients while often navigating high workload demands in community mental health settings (Lasalvia et al., 2009), exposure to trauma and crisis (Ashraf & Nassar, 2018), and broader sociopolitical policies and conditions. These factors and more may affect mental health professionals’ quality of life (Esperidião, Saidel, & Rodrigues, 2020).

These concerns can be compounded for BIPOC mental health professionals whose work involves navigating racism, cultural expectations, community responsibility, and unique relational dynamics when working with clients whose experiences overlap with their own (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1991; Shell et al., 2021; Oh et al., 2026). Therapists working with clients from their own communities or with culturally specific experiences are also navigating complex questions of identity, responsibility, representation, and systemic harm (Abugideiri & Mirza, 2026).

Training Challenges

Graduate training at both the master’s and doctoral levels often does not center the experiences of BIPOC learners, culturally indigenous ways of knowing, or communal healing modalities (Singh, 2020). These systemic curricular and epistemological choices suggest non-Western trainees and BIPOC clinicians are not only battling their own imposter syndrome (Nadal et al., 2021), but may also be undersupported when it comes to clinical consultation, interdisciplinary networking, and values-congruent community support.

Creativity as a Form of Healing and Spiritual Connection

Existing approaches to professional well-being have often emphasized individual strategies such as self-care, resilience, or stress management. These approaches can be useful but do not fully address the relational and systemic conditions that shape whether professionals can sustain demanding care work.

Systematic reviews on creative interventions for healthcare workers suggest that opportunities for art and creativity may support connection, empathy, and well-being among care professionals as well as burnout prevention (Tjasink et al., 2023; Engel et al., 2023).

References

  1. Abugideiri, S., & Mirza, F. Y. (2026, April 10–11). Building an ethical decision-making model for navigating overlapping relationships [Conference presentation]. 18th Annual Muslim Mental Health Conference: Silos to Systems: Weaving Together Strands of Muslim Mental Health, Detroit, MI, United States, and online.
  2. Ashraf, A., & Nassar, S. (2018). American Muslims and vicarious trauma: An explanatory concurrent mixed-methods study. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 88(5), 516.
  3. Comas-Diaz, L., & Jacobsen, F. M. (1991). Ethnocultural transference and countertransference in the therapeutic dyad. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 61(3).
  4. Engel et al. (2023). Full reference details to be verified by the site owner.
  5. Esperidião, Saidel, & Rodrigues (2020). Full reference details to be verified by the site owner.
  6. Lasalvia, A., Bonetto, C., Bertani, M., Bissoli, S., Cristofalo, D., Marrella, G., … & PICOS-Veneto Group. (2009). Influence of perceived organisational factors on job burnout: Survey of community mental health staff. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 195(6), 537–544.
  7. Nadal, K. L., King, R., Sissoko, D. G., Floyd, N., & Hines, D. (2021). The legacies of systemic and internalized oppression: Experiences of microaggressions, imposter phenomenon, and stereotype threat on historically marginalized groups. New Ideas in Psychology, 63, 100895.
  8. Oh, H., Winn, J., Misra, S., Nallajerla, M., Besecker, M., Wong, K., … & Moody, M. (2026). Vicarious racial discrimination and mental health among adults: A scoping review of literature published between 2010 and 2023. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 1–16.
  9. Shell, E. M., Teodorescu, D., & Williams, L. D. (2021). Investigating race-related stress, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress for Black mental health therapists. Journal of Black Psychology, 47(8), 669–694.
  10. Singh, A. (2020). Building a counseling psychology of liberation: The path behind us, under us, and before us. The Counseling Psychologist, 48(8), 1109–1130.
  11. Tjasink, M., Keiller, E., Stephens, M., Carr, C. E., & Priebe, S. (2023). Art therapy-based interventions to address burnout and psychosocial distress in healthcare workers—A systematic review. BMC Health Services Research, 23, 1059.

healing is sweeter together.

Explore Upcoming Events Get Involved