Jessica Cain

I attribute my success to my supervisor seeing potential in me when I was completely unaware of the potential I had in myself. When I first got into this field, I told them I didn't want to work with kids at all because I was afraid that I would mess up somebody's kid. But they told me, 'Well, they come to us messed up, so you can just help.' Because I did have a story, and a lot of my stuff started when I was a teenager, they thought that kids would listen to what I had to say. And they really have. So it was really about having someone believe in me before I believed in myself, and that mentor giving me that push to work with the population I was most afraid of but turned out to be most effective with.

The best career advice I've ever received is to not take things personally. Because I work in crisis and I'm with people right when something is going wrong, we get cursed out or things like that. I just try to focus on what the need is, because I know that they're not cursing me out because it's my fault. They're just very stressed out, and they don't know what to do. So I try not to take anything personally and instead focus on understanding what they need in that moment.

My advice to young women entering this industry is that boundaries are not selfish. We need to have boundaries, and we need to teach the people we work with to have their own boundaries. It's not a bad thing to have your own boundaries. This is so important because boundaries directly contribute to preventing burnout. If you don't have boundaries, you will burn out. What we teach our clients isn't just meant for them, it's meant for us too. We have to be practicing what we preach. The field is constantly low-staffed because people don't practice what they're teaching the clients, so taking care of yourself through boundaries is essential to staying in this field and providing quality care.

The biggest challenge in my field is burnout. People get burnt out and leave the field and never come back, or they get burnout and their quality of care that they're giving people is not what it should be. The clinician doesn't necessarily know how to take care of themselves, so that's a huge issue. The biggest opportunity in my field is probably going to be all the tech stuff coming in. We've got some AI coming in to help us write notes and make things more efficient, so we're not spending as much time on the computer. We don't want to record someone's whole session, but we can talk into it and it'll write what we did. This means less time on the computer and more time with the patients, which is exactly what we need.

The values most important to me are community, compassion, and service. Community is going to be number one for me. I also value compassion, which means always caring about other people and what they're going through, and then treating them with dignity. The third value would be service. I think that it's really important to contribute to something larger than my own self. These values guide everything I do, both in my work with suicidal kids and families and in my personal life with my own family and community involvement.