Maureen Dingus, the chief operating officer of the VSCPA, spoke about the many issues affecting women CPAs, such as long hours, tight deadlines and the evolving landscape of financial regulations.

She began by explaining why the VSCPA was conducting this seminar in the first place. Many people in the profession and worldwide wouldn't even use the words “mental health,” she said, opting for terms such as “self-care wellness”—terms that “soften the blow,” as she put it. “So we started to try to talk about mental health, to reduce the stigma and to explore some of the topics.” She found that there was, and still is, little research specifically about the CPA profession and mental health.

“Whenever I do see a survey, it ends up being from a technology company who is going to tell you how much time and how much stress they can save you,” she said. “But I wouldn't call that real research that we can dig our hands into and dig into it and figure things out.” She urged the attendees to read an article titled, “Depression and the CPA,” Mark J. Cowan of Boise State University’s first-person account of his struggle with the disorder. Dingus called it “groundbreaking.”

Discussing how CPAs may address their own mental health difficulties, Dingus cited a 2022 Going Concern post in which a senior partner provided career advice on how to avoid burnout.

The partner “gave a very basic response to this,” she said: “Eat well, exercise, turn off your computer, have a passion project.” Noting how that was not her experience when at a Big Four firm, she asked, “So who are you really talking to? So there’s some skepticism when a lot of people in our profession hear about some of the solutions that are given, but the truth is some of them will work for you.”

After reading this post, Dingus said that she went on to Reddit and found many posts on the subject. She saw posts about burnout in school, burnout when trying to pass the CPA exam, and on-the-job burnout. One particular answer to the posted question, “How do you handle burnout?” stood out to her so much that she read the answer:

“I have two busy seasons under my belt, and I’m totally burned out. Every day I try to tell myself I’ll finish XYZ task and end up not having the energy to finish. I stay up and work later hours to make up for not getting much done during the day. This is making my burnout feel even worse. I don’t know how to stop this. ... I wake up every morning feeling anxious and panic because I don’t know what to tell my senior. I dread everything about work and I have lost all self-confidence. I feel like a total failure, but I’m afraid to quit because I feel like I’ll start spiraling even more. Any tips?”

CPAs are hearing younger people talk this way, Dingus said, observing that it is no wonder that they are leaving the profession.

To get a more personal sense of the experiences, Dingus directed the attendees’ attention to a TedTalk video by Jen Fisher, , the chief wellness officer at Deloitte, a cancer survivor and a burnout survivor.

Fisher started by saying that cancer was not her biggest challenge. Working all hours of the day and night, and weekends and holidays, was what she felt she had to do to be successful. “I was losing myself little by little and I didn’t even know it,” she said. “The work I was doing was so important. It’s not like I could just walk away. And that’s what burnout looked like for me.”

It was acceptable to talk about her cancer diagnosis to ask for help, she said, “but burnout is different. And because there’s not a concrete medical diagnosis for burnout, some even question its validity. And at the time, so did I. Because on the outside I was a picture of success but, on the inside, I was at my rock bottom, without an idea of how to get myself out of it. As crazy as it may sound, I often felt that cancer was easier than burnout. When you’re going through chemo, it’s visible. Burnout isn’t. And many in the workplace still believe that burnout can be fixed by resting over the weekend or taking a vacation at the end of a grueling project. Or better yet, by taking a company-sponsored yoga class.”

After the clip ended, Dingus listed the common terms used to define mental health: emotional well-being, good behavior, judgment, relative freedom from anxiety and disabling systems symptoms, and the capacity to establish constructive relationships. Mental illness, she said, is characterized by cognitive and emotional disturbances, abnormal behaviors, impaired functioning or any combination of these, which might be brought on because of chemical changes in in the brain, and might be genetic or hereditary or situational. Seeking to differentiate stress from burnout—though the terms are often used interchangeably—she called stress “more of a concrete contained feeling, so you know there’s a beginning, middle and end. It’s not a sustained, longer-term experience like burnout,” which is characterized by feelings of energy depletion or emotional exhaustion, increased mental distance from one’s work and negative or cynical feelings toward one’s work, and a reduced sense of efficacy at work.

Workplace burnout matters, she said, as it has organizational, physical and psychological implications. It results in a 57 percent increased risk of a prolonged absence from work, a 180 percent increased risk of developing depressive disorders, an 84 percent increased risk of Type 2 diabetes, and a 40 percent increased risk of hypertension.  

Burnout affects women more than men, she pointed out, citing statistics demonstrating that 42 percent of women and 35 percent of men in corporate America have felt burned out; one in three women say then have considered downshifting, or leaving work altogether; 60 percent of women are more likely to be focusing on emotional support in the office; 60 percent of mothers with young children spend five or more hours on housework and caregiving; and that women are more likely to work the “third shift.”

Before enumerating the 12 steps of burnout, Dingus told the attendees what often happens before the condition sets in: insomnia, nightmares, physical exhaustion, a change in eating habits, and headaches and stomach aches.

“It can wreck you, so if you’re not being able to get sleep, if you’re having nightmares, the physical exhaustion which we talked about earlier, the change in your eating habits, … that’s something to look out for,” she said. “The headaches and stomach aches, those chronic feelings of ‘what's going on with my gut’ [are] not normal. So those are the things that you need to look out for.”

To counteract all of this, Dingus exhorted the CPA profession, to, among other things, embrace remote work and flexibility, limit season overtime requirements, and pay attention to employee engagement and wellness.

Focus on life goals, she advised the attendees, such as a sustainable workload, a supportive work community, norms of fairness and respect, and well-aligned values and meaningful work.

“Be bold with your business model,” her final slide concluded. “Check on your friends. Do work that matters and be happy.”