u/Complex-Major-9029

I’m in my second year of a clinical psychology PhD program and I’m really suffering. I’m so unbelievably burnt out, and it feels like there’s no end in sight.

We’re expected to work over breaks, and honestly, they barely feel like breaks at all. Our therapy clinic only closes for about 3 weeks a year, and if it’s open, we’re expected to be seeing clients. So even when the university is “on break,” we’re still working.

We were also told repeatedly during our first year not to expect to take weekends off. If we want even one day off, we’re expected to make up for it by doing a heavy workload on the other weekend day.

On top of that, we have around 7 hours of mandatory meetings every week, and we’re expected to respond to emails within 24 hours or less. If we don’t, we get follow-up emails or texts from supervisors, sometimes scolding us.

There’s also a lot of inconsistency in expectations. I’ll be told one thing individually, and then something completely different in group settings. It feels like there’s a disconnect across faculty, and no matter what I do, I’m doing something wrong.

I also have academic accommodations, and that’s been a big challenge in my program. I already have a master’s degree where I took APA-accredited, PhD-level courses alongside doctoral students, and my accommodations were never an issue there. They always knew how to handle them and support me.

In my current program, though, it feels like it’s always this big thing. Like they don’t really know what to do, and it turns into an ongoing issue instead of something straightforward.

I’m in my second year of a clinical psychology PhD program and I’m really suffering. I’m so unbelievably burnt out, and it feels like there’s no end in sight.

We’re expected to work over breaks, and honestly, they barely feel like breaks at all. Our therapy clinic only closes for about 3 weeks a year, and if it’s open, we’re expected to be seeing clients. So even when the university is “on break,” we’re still working.

We were also told repeatedly during our first year not to expect to take weekends off. If we want even one day off, we’re expected to make up for it by doing a heavy workload on the other weekend day.

On top of that, we have around 7 hours of mandatory meetings every week, and we’re expected to respond to emails within 24 hours or less. If we don’t, we get follow-up emails or texts from supervisors, sometimes scolding us.

There’s also a lot of inconsistency in expectations. I’ll be told one thing individually, and then something completely different in group settings. It feels like there’s a disconnect across faculty, and no matter what I do, I’m doing something wrong.

In addition to carrying a pretty significant therapy caseload, we’re required to complete at least one comprehensive psych eval each semester (including summer). These evals involve an ~8-hour assessment day and a 16–18 page report, and we’re expected to complete everything within 5 weeks of the first appointment—even if the client needs multiple sessions.

On top of everything else, I’m also at an external clinical placement for 8 hours once a week, where I have a separate set of expectations and responsibilities.

The hardest part is that we often don’t find out we’ve been assigned an eval until about a week beforehand. That means we have to completely rearrange our schedules, drop planned study/research time, and then deal with research mentors being frustrated that we didn’t get enough done that week. But when we prioritize research, clinical supervisors say we’re behind clinically.

On top of all of this, our coursework is still extremely heavy. For finals, it’s normal for a class to assign an 8–9 page paper the week of finals, plus a final presentation and a final exam for the same course.