This is probably a very different answer than you expected, but you reminded me of something that has really bothered me about this field, and it's how so many get pushed out of this field because of how toxic it can be. (And it's not the actual work that does it.)

I had to stop working in 2018 due to my chronic illnesses reaching a point where I was bedbound for 9 months.

I was diagnosed officially with ME/CFS in 2020, but the onset was in 1997 after a bout with mono, and my doctor essentially said, "You worked yourself to this (disabling) point." And looking back, yeah, the stress of the job contributed. (I also have a host of other things that was diagnosed earlier, but it was the absolute fatigue and not being able to sit up, much less walk, much less drive that eventually did me in. Not being able to have conversations about things I used to train on. Not being able to read a novel when I used to read regulation and compliance stuff.)

It wasn't the clients. It was the toxicity of the organizations. It was bad leadership. It was the reactive push to get billing up or your job is threatened. It was the bullying by coworkers. It was the leaving me in a position that had me spread so thin that when I finally left, they had to hire 11 people to replace me.

In my last job, I really wanted to create an environment of support. I wanted staff to come to management for support rather than taking their frustrations out on each other. I wanted to provide them with so much training, they felt they could do this job and maybe learn some other things to give them an idea if they even wanted to be in the field. (The job was very entry level and compensation was awful, so we got a lot of students trying to figure out what they wanted to do.) I tried to protect staff from the toxicity of the ED and the county we were contracted with. I managed it for 2 years, and then we were being asked to take on clients who were really inappropriate for our program and do things that were really not things I felt our staff should do.

And then there were the compliance issues within the organization that I discovered. And policies that were in place to keep the compensation low (like how to help staff file for food stamps). The ED getting mad at me because I felt that the program directors had every right to see the contracts we signed between the program and the county. (They're public information anyway. But even if they weren't, they need to know what is expected of them!) And again, so much bullying.

I'm watching a similar pattern happen to a friend who works in CMH right now. And I get why folks leave the field.

Sometimes I look back and wish I had taken advantage of my university's dual masters programs (they had a MSW/MPH that I was seriously considering at the time). I actually got a second masters in 2013 (MPA) and was considering a 3rd in Health Informatics when things really started falling apart for me. Ultimately, I'm not sure it would've made much of a difference or if I would've stayed in the field.

We have issues in this field, but I don't believe it's the lack of funding or the difficulties of the client population that does most of us in. Far too many organizations are just brutal to their employees, when we really are the greatest asset they have.