Therapy for Physicians & Doctors
Private, in-depth therapy for physicians navigating burnout and the emotional toll of medicine
Los Angeles psychologists licensed to provide therapy to clients anywhere in California, Texas, and 43 PSYPACT states across the U.S.
Therapy for Those Who Carry the Weight of Medicine
For many physicians, burnout can start to feel like a way of life. The emotional intensity, relentless responsibility, and pressure to keep functioning can become so constant that they start to feel normal.
You may have already tried the usual routes to address physician burnout: taking time off, exercising more, physician coaching, mindfulness apps, productivity changes, wellness modules, peer support, or other forms of therapy that never quite understood the realities of medicine.
But when your life is built around pressure, responsibility, emotional containment, and constantly being needed, these kinds of surface-level supports often don’t reach the deeper patterns keeping you stuck.
That’s where therapy for doctors and physicians at Helm Psychology comes in. We are deeply familiar with the systemic realities, pressures, and demands of medical life.
We help attending physicians, specialist physicians, physician executives, and private practice owners navigate burnout, anxiety, perfectionism, over-responsibility, compassion fatigue, relationship strain, and the complicated emotional toll of caring for others in high-stakes settings.
Our work is especially attuned to doctors in high-pressure specialties, including: surgery, orthopedics, anesthesiology, cardiology, emergency medicine, oncology, radiology, OB-GYN, and other demanding fields.
As featured in…
You Can Be a Good Doctor
Without Disappearing into the Role.
You get used to the long days, sleepless nights, missed meals, delayed needs, and constant pressure to keep going. During residency or fellowship, you may have told yourself things would get better once training was over, once you were an attending, once you had more control.
But then you get to the other side and realize that life still feels relentless.
You may be competent as hell, deeply committed to your patients, yet you still feel drained, overwhelmed, resentful, or disconnected from the work you once cared so much about. You may be the doer and the fixer, both at work and at home.
But inside, you’re exhausted beyond belief: physically, mentally, and emotionally. You may not be falling apart. But you may no longer feel like yourself.
The same traits that helped you become a good doctor—discipline, responsibility, self-sacrifice, conscientiousness, emotional control, and the ability to push through—can also make it hard to recognize when something is wrong.
Compassion fatigue may have started to creep in. You may feel more cynical or jaded with patients and colleagues than you want to admit. You may come home with nothing left to give your partner, your kids, your friends, or yourself.
And sometimes, the thoughts are harder to say out loud:
“What would my life be like if I stopped practicing medicine?”
“Do I even want to do this anymore?”
“Did I make a mistake becoming a doctor?”
These thoughts can feel scary, especially when you worked so hard to get here. But they’re not a sign of weakness. They are often signals that something important in you needs attention.
The deeper struggle with doctor’s burnout is not just workload. It’s the way that practicing medicine has intensified patterns that were already there: people-pleasing, overachieving, self-sacrificing, perfectionism, guilt about saying no, and the feeling that your needs only matter once everyone else has been taken care of.
By the time many doctors reach out for therapy, they worry that it will be one more stressful thing to fit into an already impossible schedule. They worry they will spend half the time explaining the realities of medical life to a therapist who does not really get it. And they may wonder whether therapy can actually help when so much of the problem is built into the system.
Therapy cannot erase the systemic realities of medicine. But it can give you a place to stop carrying them alone. A place to understand how medical culture has shaped your relationship to rest, boundaries, achievement, guilt, anger, vulnerability, and need.
At Helm Psychology, therapy for physicians gives you a private, confidential space where you do not have to be the doctor in the room. You do not have to perform, reassure, minimize, or hold it all together. You get to speak honestly, slow down, and understand what is happening beneath the burnout.
Why Therapy for Physicians Needs to Be Different
Despite how far we’ve come in normalizing mental health care, many doctors still feel pressure to handle things on their own. Stigma is part of it, but for doctors, it’s usually more complicated than that.
For physicians, seeking therapy can come with complicated concerns about privacy, professional identity, licensure, credentialing, and what it means to need support when you are usually the one providing it.
That pressure starts early. Medical training often rewards endurance, independence, and the ability to keep functioning, no matter the cost. The more you can carry without complaint, the more capable you may seem. And when overwork is modeled as dedication, it can become hard to tell where commitment ends and self-erasure begins.
Physicians are held to incredibly high standards, both internally and externally. You may feel pressure to be competent, available, composed, and careful, even when you are exhausted, anxious, numb, or struggling silently. And because so much of your life is spent caring for others, it can feel uncomfortable, or even selfish, to care for yourself.
But struggling with burnout, anxiety, depression, strained relationships, or the emotional toll of medicine is not a personal failure. It is an understandable response to an intense, high-stakes profession that asks a tremendous amount of you, often too much.
Working with a therapist who understands doctors can make a real difference. You should not have to spend your therapy hour explaining why the inbox never ends, why a bad outcome can stay with you for days, why saying no feels complicated, or why “just take a vacation” does not fix burnout.
Therapy should feel private, thoughtful, and worth the time it takes to show up. Not like another place where you have to manage your therapist’s knowledge base or how you are perceived by them.
At Helm Psychology, we understand both the visible and invisible pressures of medical life: the responsibility, perfectionism, guilt, confidentiality concerns, identity questions, and complicated mix of meaning and depletion that can come with being a physician.
Benefits of Therapy for Doctors
Therapy for physicians can help you understand what is happening beneath the burnout, not just manage the symptoms of it.
A private space where you do not have to be the doctor
In physician therapy, you do not have to be composed, reassuring, helpful, or clinically useful to anyone else. You get a space where you can say what you actually feel, including the thoughts that may feel too dark, complicated, resentful, or “ungrateful” to say anywhere else.
A deeper understanding of physician burnout
Burnout is not always solved by taking time off, changing jobs, or downloading yet another meditation app. In therapy for physicians, we look at why exhaustion keeps returning, why rest can feel so hard to tolerate, and what deeper patterns may be keeping you stuck in overwork, guilt, or emotional depletion.
A less punishing relationship with responsibility
Many doctors carry responsibility intensely. Therapy can help you understand how perfectionism, fear of mistakes, guilt, and the pressure to never disappoint anyone shape the way you move through both work and life. The goal is not to make you careless, but instead, to help responsibility feel less crushing.
More room to process the emotional toll of medicine
Physicians witness and absorb so much: suffering, uncertainty, patient deaths, difficult outcomes, complications, moral injury, vicarious trauma, and direct trauma exposure. Over time, those experiences can leave you feeling jaded, numb, guilty, angry, helpless, or existentially shaken. Therapy gives you room to process what you have had to push aside in order to keep functioning.
A steadier sense of self beyond medicine
Medicine can take up so much room that it becomes hard to know who you are outside of being useful, competent, and needed. Therapy for physicians can help you reconnect with the parts of yourself that training, overwork, and responsibility may have pushed aside, so your identity does not have to rise and fall with how well you are functioning as a doctor.
More presence in your relationships and personal life
Burnout does not stay neatly contained at work. It often shows up as irritability, numbness, distance, resentment, or having nothing left to give. Therapy can help you become more emotionally available to yourself and the people you love, without feeling like your needs are just another problem to solve.
Why Helm Psychology Is Especially Attuned to Doctors
A Note from Annia Raja, PhD
Working with physicians has been a central focus of my practice for years, and it is one of the core reasons I built Helm Psychology.
I did not arrive at this specialty abstractly. My understanding of physician life has been shaped by years of experience, both professionally and personally.
Professionally, I received my PhD from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, a top-tier academic medical institution for a wide array of specialties. This means that much of my clinical training involved collaborating closely with physicians. Training within a top-notch medical institution required me to become intensely familiar with the systemic realities, pressures, and workflow patterns of daily physician life.
Personally, my husband is a physician in an incredibly demanding and rigorous specialty, and many of our friends and colleagues are physicians across many fields. Over the years, I have seen the parts of medical life that most people never see: the sleepless nights on call, the exhaustion after long days, the agony after difficult outcomes or complications, the pressure to keep going no matter what, and the ways that hospital systems can compound the overwhelm doctors already feel.
This combination of clinical training, ongoing personal connections to medicine, and years of working with physicians in therapy is a pivotal part of what shapes Helm Psychology, and it fundamentally informs how we work with doctors across the practice.
Our clinicians bring substantial experience working with doctors, executives, and other high-achieving professionals, particularly around burnout, over-responsibility, perfectionism, leadership stress, relationship strain, and the difficulty of slowing down when you are used to being needed. As Helm Psychology grows, our clinicians are selected for their ability to do careful, depth-oriented work with people carrying unusually high levels of responsibility.
For physicians, that means we do not treat burnout as simply a time-management problem or a failure of self-care. We understand that physician burnout often lives at the intersection of systemic pressures, medical culture, identity, perfectionism, responsibility, guilt, and the deeply personal patterns that make it hard to stop over-functioning.
At Helm Psychology, comprised of Annia Raja PhD and Chaim Rochester PhD, we bring a depth-oriented, psychodynamic approach to therapy for doctors and physicians. We help you look beneath the immediate symptoms and understand the traits, experiences, relationships, and internal pressures that may be contributing to your struggles.
At the same time, we know that you are the expert on your own experience. Our role is not to tell you who you are or what you need to do. Our role is to offer a thoughtful, confidential space where you can speak honestly, feel understood, and begin to make sense of what has become unsustainable.
The goal is not to make you less committed to your work. It is to help you be more present, secure, and fulfilled within medicine and beyond it.
Ways to Work With Us
Depth therapy for doctors and physicians does not have to happen in only one format.
At Helm Psychology, sessions can happen in different time containers: a steady weekly rhythm, a monthly intensive cadence, or a focused intensive when something needs more room than a standard therapy session can hold.
Weekly Therapy
This is how we work with most of our clients. Coming consistently—weekly at minimum, or even 2-3 times a week—gives us room to understand and process patterns that keep showing up in your work, relationships, body, ambition, identity, and sense of self. And to stay with them long enough for real growth to unfold.
For some clients, though, a weekly rhythm may not be the right fit—or it may not be enough. This is why, in addition to weekly therapy, we also offer two therapy intensive formats:
Monthly Intensive Therapy
Monthly intensive therapy is for clients who want depth and continuity, but need longer sessions less often or whose lives may not fit neatly into a weekly appointment. The work still has continuity, but with more room in each meeting to settle in, follow complexity, and stay with what can sometimes get rushed or flattened in a standard therapy session.
Focused Therapy Intensives
Focused intensives offer concentrated time when something cannot keep being managed around the edges. This could be around a specific pressure point, transition, decision, stuck pattern, or emotional question—or on something harder to name that needs more attention. They are not a shortcut around depth; they are a larger container with more space than a standard therapy session allows.
Feel More at the Helm of Your Life Again
You do not have to choose between being a good doctor and feeling like a whole person.
Therapy for physicians at Helm Psychology gives you a private, depth-oriented space to understand what is happening beneath the burnout, so you can feel more present in your work, your relationships, and your life beyond medicine.
FAQs about our mental health services for doctors
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Though this isn't an exhaustive list, the following mental health professionals can provide individual and group therapy for physicians: clinical social workers, pastoral counselors (members of the clergy who have specialized training in clinical pastoral education), marriage and family therapists, and psychologists. Most mental health professionals obtain a master's degree to provide therapy.
As clinical psychologists, we have PhD doctoral degrees in my practice. Many mental health professionals have extensive training and can provide individual therapy, family therapy, and group therapy. However, not all have direct experience as therapists for physicians.
All the therapists in our practice have extensive experience treating doctors in therapy.
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Yes, we provide counseling exclusively online. This allows us to offer mental health care to a wide range of medical professionals across the states of California, Texas, and 43 other states, including doctors in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Westwood, West Hollywood, San Francisco, Orange County, Palo Alto, San Diego, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and more.
Many doctors enjoy online therapy for the convenience. Your jam-packed schedule doesn't allow you much extra time, so being able to quickly join virtual sessions can be clutch. All sessions take place via a HIPAA-compliant platform to ensure that your information stays confidential.
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Yes, confidentiality is incredibly serious to me. And you’re not alone in this fear. In fact, one study suggests that nearly 40% of physicians are reluctant to seek mental health care out of concern for jeopardizing their medical license. While your concerns are valid, so is your well-being.
Confidentiality is the utmost priority in my practice. As a therapist for physicians, I am not in-network with any insurance companies. This allows us to forgo giving a potentially stigmatizing diagnosis that you may fear having to disclose beyond our client-therapist relationship. Instead, we can support your mental health on your terms alone.
Confidentiality concerns can lead some physicians to seek care without using any health insurance benefits. Nonetheless, if you choose, you also have the option of pursuing out-of-network reimbursement for sessions. Whatever works for you, works for us.
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This specialized therapy is often a good fit for doctors who are outwardly high-functioning and successful, yet privately, they’re deeply struggling. This may include doctors who are experiencing burnout, anxiety, relationship difficulties, a sense of emotional depletion, or so many other possible difficulties (be it internally or externally).
Many of the physicians we work with are deeply capable in their professional roles, yet they find themselves repeatedly caught in patterns of perfectionism, self-criticism, painful family-of-origin dynamics, and so many other things that no longer serve them. And they come to therapy because they realize that these things are difficult to untangle on their own. This work is well suited for physicians who are ready to look beyond simplistic symptom management and instead explore the deeper emotional patterns shaping how they live and relate.
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Many stress-management approaches focus primarily on coping strategies, “quick fixes,” or symptom reduction as the main therapeutic goals. While these tools can be helpful to some extent, many physicians share that they eventually reach a ceiling in how effective these techniques feel—or that they miss the deeper mark altogether.
In our therapy work with physicians, we take a deeper, psychodynamic approach. Together, we explore the underlying emotional and relational patterns that shape how you work, relate, carry responsibility, and move through your life both inside and outside of medicine.
This work helps physicians understand the deeper emotional forces that drive perfectionism, over-responsibility, chronic pressure, and a sense of inner emptiness. Rather than offering tools to simply “manage symptoms,” the focus is on developing lasting insight and internal change, so that relief is not just temporary or surface-level.
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Yes, our practice operates exclusively online via a secure, encrypted, HIPAA-compliant video platform. This allows busy medical professionals in Santa Monica and Los Angeles to access depth-oriented care conveniently without the additional stress of commuting to an office for every session—something that many busy doctors find essential for making therapy sustainable.
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Yes, many physicians who come to therapy with us are experiencing burnout—not because they lack resilience or coping skills, but because of long-standing internal patterns that make rest, limits, and self-care difficult to sustain.
In our work together, we look beyond simply the symptoms of exhaustion to understand the emotional and relational dynamics that often drive the chronic overwork, perfectionism, self-pressure, and more. We also work on naming and validating the systemic factors within medicine and society writ large that contribute to their burnout.
By developing insight into these deeper patterns, therapy can help create change that feels more lasting and meaningful, rather than temporary relief. This work is especially helpful for physicians who find that burnout keeps returning, even when external circumstances improve.
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We operate as an out-of-network practice and do not bill insurance companies directly. Many physicians choose this model because it allows for greater privacy, flexibility, and depth in the work.
That said, we are also happy to help if you choose to seek out-of-network reimbursement with your insurance. We can provide monthly superbills or, in many cases, submit out-of-network claims electronically on your behalf, depending on your particular insurance plan.
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Many physicians are highly capable problem-solvers and “doers”/“fixers” who are accustomed to being the one who others rely on for help. These are wonderful strengths that often serve them well in medicine, but they don’t always translate when it comes other parts of their lives, particularly those related to emotional, relational, or personal patterns shaped over time.
Therapy offers a space where you don’t have to be the expert or have the answers. Instead, it provides room to reflect, gain perspective, and understand patterns that are difficult (if not impossible) to see clearly on your own.
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Therapy in my practice is structured at a minimum of once a week for sessions. This level of consistency is important for the depth-oriented work that we do, as it allows enough continuity to build momentum, insight, and meaningful change over time, rather than our time together becoming primarily about updates, playing catch up, or staying at the surface level due to long gaps between our meetings.
Some physicians also choose to meet more frequently, depending on their needs and goals, and this is certainly something that we can discuss together.
