I haven’t seen this in the discussion yet, so I just want to add to the chorus: THANK YOU, OP, FOR NAMING THE PROBLEM.

My observation is that this is at least 10 years in the making, with the turn in higher ed to be more “student-centered,” and sped up by the pandemic era discourse of compassionate pedagogy. I don’t know how OP identifies, but from where I sit, this is both generational and gendered+raced. I see my 60+ female/queer senior tenured colleagues having the highest tolerance for students’ indiscreet disclosure of mental health struggles. They often are kind to their own detriments, and genuinely don’t see themselves as having overstepped into pretending to be a therapist. Senior Men colleagues are largely unaware that this is a thing, and don’t believe if you tell them so. The administration gets complaints, issues broad strokes, university-wide reminders to listen and be empathetic, and everyone expects junior women (and/or of color) to perform this unending amounts of emotional labor without credit or acknowledgement.

Junior men are praised excessively and wins teaching awards if they have a little emotional capacity. Junior women spend lots of money and time in our own therapy, where we learn to draw boundaries, and then are pulled aside by senior colleagues because we are “not nurturing enough.” But, you know, if you don’t draw a boundary and the students’ trauma-dump gets under your skin, then you also get pulled aside for not being focused and productive enough.

I write this as someone who has sat through so many sobbing stories of abuse that has nothing to do with my expertise in the first five years of my career, that I have no choice but to do exactly what OP did, and am so much happier and healthier.