The numbers behind the exhaustion

A team at the University of Calgary's Werklund School of Education ran a three year study of Alberta educators, using survey data from the Alberta Teachers Association and the Alberta School Employee Benefits Plan. The pattern they found was not subtle.

The share of teachers reporting high compassion fatigue rose from 13.6 percent in 2020 to 22.7 percent by 2023. Over the same period, the share reporting high compassion satisfaction, the sense of fulfillment that keeps people in the profession, fell from 11.3 percent to 6.3 percent. Teachers were feeling both more drained and less rewarded, at the same time.

The researchers also tracked burnout symptoms directly. By the third year of the study, roughly 9 in 10 teachers reported exhaustion and lack of energy in the past six months. More than 6 in 10 reported sleep disorders. These are not soft complaints. They are the same symptom clusters clinicians look for when assessing occupational burnout.

A separate study, published in Frontiers in Public Health, surveyed 780 high school teachers across three provinces and found Alberta had the highest rate of emotional exhaustion of the group, at 83.1 percent. A related paper using the same national dataset found that teachers reporting high stress were over seven times more likely to meet criteria for likely major depression and likely generalized anxiety than their lower stress peers.

Put plainly, Alberta is not an average case in this data. It is close to the top of it.

Why "burnout" undersells what is happening

The word burnout tends to conjure an image of someone who just needs a vacation. The Calgary researchers use a more precise term borrowed from trauma psychology, compassion fatigue, sometimes called secondary traumatic stress. It describes what happens to people who absorb other people's distress as a routine part of their job, the way paramedics, nurses, and social workers do.

Teachers were not originally studied through this lens, on the assumption that crisis intervention was someone else's job. But as school counsellor and psychologist positions have not kept pace with need, teachers increasingly are the first adult a struggling student talks to. The researchers point out that this role was never built into the job description, yet it has become routine.

That distinction matters, because it changes what kind of support actually helps. A single long weekend does not resolve secondary traumatic stress any more than it resolves the aftermath of a car accident. The nervous system needs to process what it has absorbed, not just rest from it.

What the research says about mid-career teachers specifically

One of the more striking findings involves who is hit hardest. It is not the newest teachers, and it is not the ones about to retire. Teachers with 11 to 15 years of experience consistently showed both the highest compassion fatigue and, somewhat paradoxically, moderate to high compassion satisfaction. They still find meaning in the work. They are also the most depleted by it.

This is the group least likely to be captured by "new teacher mentorship" programs or "retirement planning" resources, because neither is designed for them. If your staff room has a cluster of teachers a decade into the job who seem more tired than they used to, the data suggests you are not imagining it.

What actually helps, according to the same study

The researchers were candid that only self-care advice is not enough. Their recommendations focus on systemic change, smaller classes, more support staff, and psychologically safer workplaces. But they also flagged something at the individual level worth naming directly: most teachers who sought help used their personal support network first, followed by professional services like therapy. Fewer than half used employer-supported mental health benefits, even where those benefits existed.

That gap between what is available and what gets used is worth sitting with. Many extended health plans through Alberta school boards do cover registered psychologist services, which means the barrier is often awareness rather than access.

For teachers dealing specifically with the cumulative, secondary trauma described in the research, rather than a single acute incident, EMDR is one of the approaches with a solid evidence base for processing memories or experiences that stay activated in the nervous system long after the workday ends. It is not a replacement for systemic fixes like smaller class sizes or better staffing. It is a tool for the individual nervous system in the meantime, while those larger changes, if they come, take years.

McKenzie Snyder, a Calgary psychologist whose practice treats trauma-related conditions, has built his approach around a similar distinction. His clinical philosophy centres on measurable progress toward a client's own goals, not simply feeling better in the moment without real change underneath it. For a teacher who has spent a decade absorbing other people's crises, that distinction, feeling calmer versus actually processing what happened, tends to matter.

EMDR therapy clinic, Snyder Psychology in Calgary has more detail on how the approach works for people in high exposure roles.

The bigger picture

None of this data suggests every stressed teacher needs clinical treatment. Most of what the Calgary researchers call for is structural, funding, staffing, and workload, not therapy. But it also does not suggest teachers should wait for the system to fix itself before they get support for what they are already carrying.

Alberta's numbers on this are not ambiguous. Compassion fatigue nearly doubled in three years. The people most affected are often the ones holding the profession together, the mid-career teachers everyone assumes have figured it out by now. Naming that clearly, using real numbers instead of vague sympathy, is the first step toward taking it seriously.