The Profession Is Finally Talking About Mental Health the Right Way. This Book Shows What That Looks Like.

There is a number that gets passed around a lot when veterinary medicine talks about its own mental health. Seventy-five percent. That is the share of veterinarians who report career satisfaction in research conducted by Brakke Consulting in 2023, a number that sits higher than the U.S. average for employed adults.

It gets cited as evidence that the profession is not as broken as the burnout headlines suggest. And in one sense, that is true.

But career satisfaction and mental wellbeing are not the same question, and the same 2023 data makes that distinction impossible to ignore.

Zoom out from the 75% and the picture gets more complicated. Among veterinary support staff, 73% report mid to high job satisfaction and 81% say they take pride in their work. Those are not small numbers. This is a profession full of people who genuinely love what they do.

And yet. Veterinary team wellbeing and mental health scores fall below the general population. Burnout scores run higher. Only 36% of veterinary teams report that mental health is openly discussed in the workplace at all. The gaps are sharpest among young professionals, support staff, and underrepresented groups. And while progress is real — the share of clinics offering an employee assistance program has grown from 27% in 2019 to 31% in 2021 to 38% in 2023 — that still means nearly two out of three veterinary workplaces have no formal mental health support structure in place.

You can find your work deeply meaningful and still be burning out. You can love what you do and still not be okay. The profession scores high on one metric and struggles on the other, and the distance between those two things is where a lot of veterinary professionals live quietly, without language for it, without a place to put it.

Dr. Jessica Turner has been building that place for years.

The DVM, mental health advocate, and longtime host of Living Well with Dr. Jessica Turner on Vet Candy has spent the better part of a decade having the conversations veterinary medicine needed but was not quite ready to have. Openly, without performance, and from the inside. She knows this community because she is this community. She has lived the version of the story that does not make it onto conference keynote slides: the depression carried since childhood, the anxiety that never fully went away, the grief of losing someone to suicide, the PTSD that reshaped how she moved through the world, the coping mechanisms that looked like healing until she held them up to the light.

Her new book, Blackbird, is what happens when someone finally writes all of it down.

Named for the Beatles song that kept her company through her darkest nights, Blackbird is not a recovery memoir. That distinction matters, and Dr. Turner is deliberate about it from the first pages. The profession already has plenty of stories about people who went through something terrible and came out transformed. Those stories have their place. But they can also be quietly devastating for the people who are still in the middle of their own hard season, who have already tried everything and are still not okay, who feel the gap between someone else's breakthrough and wherever they are right now.

Blackbird does not offer a breakthrough. It offers something more honest and more useful: companionship. A truthful account of what it actually looks like to carry depression and anxiety not as a chapter in a life but as a thread woven through the whole thing. Written by someone who spent years believing she had outrun her darkness, only to discover that the running itself had been part of the problem.

"This book is not about having overcome my darkness," Dr. Turner says. "It is about facing what I had been avoiding. The patterns, the invisible threads, the coping mechanisms that looked like healing until I held them up to the light."

Thirty-eight percent of clinics now offer an employee assistance program. That is progress. It is also not enough, and it is not the same as a culture where struggling is allowed. Most people in this profession are not going to call a hotline. They are going to keep showing up, keep holding it together, keep telling themselves they are fine because the job requires it and the culture rewards it.

What might actually reach them is a book written by someone who did all of those same things, for years, and is finally telling the truth about what it cost.

The data says 75% of veterinarians love their work. It also says the profession's wellbeing scores lag the general population, that burnout is elevated across the entire team, and that most workplaces are still not having the conversation.

Blackbird is the conversation.