CAREER teacher Sue Webb remembers the weekend she suffered a paralysing panic attack while on a busy Sunshine Coast motorway.
The stresses of being a teacher had come to a head and would later spiral into emotional chaos.
“It was originally diagnosed as a panic attack and then I experienced problems with mental health over the next four years,” Mrs Webb said, reflecting on a dark chapter of her life.
Unchecked stress and declining mental health are conditions she now sees as all-too-common amongst the teaching ranks.
Mrs Webb’s book, Teachers Cry Too, explores her own harrowing journey through the emptiness of fear, isolation and shame, and the realisation that the career she blamed for making her sick, also had the power to pull her out of the abyss.
“I didn’t write the book because I was jaded with the profession – in fact the very opposite,” she said.
“What I’ve tried to do in telling my story was pinpoint what happened to me, because I didn’t understand the experience.
“Teaching is a profession that I’ve dedicated over half a lifetime to, and I hope that the story reassures people that there is life after burnout and it is possible to re-engage with your profession, as I have.”
After more than 30 years as a teacher and school leader in Queensland Catholic schools, Sue Webb has many insights to offer about the importance of mental health and wellbeing in education, and the challenges facing younger teachers.
Mrs Webb cites the latest Australian Catholic University survey findings that show heavy workloads, lack of time and teacher shortages driving school principals towards resignation and early retirement, with the number of principals wanting to quit or retire early tripling since 2019.
ACU research has also highlighted that almost half of serving teachers say they have considered leaving the job due to stress. It pinpointed the demands of delivering classes during the COVID-19 pandemic brought to a head the ongoing crisis in teacher mental health.
Mrs Webb said many teachers were taking jobs for less pay, trading off money for a better work-life balance.
“I think there are too many teachers spending too much time at their desks and in their offices drowning under paperwork … It takes them away from the whole purpose of their work which is teaching and learning and working with young people,” she said.
Teachers Cry Too includes a chapter on loss. It deals with the impact on teachers who suffer the loss of a student.
“It’s just devastating. It just rocks a school community because the things that make us good teachers is our ability to establish meaningful relationships with kids,” Mrs Webb said.
Amongst her experiences, Mrs Webb was a teacher at Siena College on the Sunshine Coast at a time when the school was dealing with the disappearance of Daniel Morcombe. She played a key role at Daniel’s funeral.
She refers to “the invisible emotional load” placed on teachers at times of great loss.
“I wanted to reveal to readers the impact of that on teachers and school communities,” she said.
She said in those situations, teachers suppressed their own emotional responses because they tried to be professional, because of what they needed to do in front of students who were also grieving, and to be able to support them.
“The problem for me (and I think a lot of teachers) is that if we don’t have an opportunity to properly debrief, we tend to internalise it,” she said.
“At some point it gets too much.”
Mrs Webb said her own, cautionary story about having a breakdown was that she panicked when trying to deal with the situation, rather than taking immediate steps to deal with an illness.
“I didn’t admit to anybody that I was not coping,” she said.
“And in that, I confused secrecy with privacy to try and keep things hidden and to protect my professional life.
“It became exhausting because I had to invent avoidance strategies, pretences and excuses.”
Mrs Webb stressed the need to seek professional support as soon as there were symptoms.
Now she uses strategies such as “time mapping” to help her cope.
“What that involves is just reporting certain times of the day where you can feel anxiety levels spiking,” Mrs Webb said.
“It may coincide with a particular event that causes your anxiety to rise, or it might be a particular time of day.
“By mapping those times, you can identify when you might be more vulnerable to rising anxiety levels – and that helps prepare coping strategies in advance.
“In teaching we talk about the ‘Sunday blues’ or ‘Sunday scaries’ – teachers typically experience that around three or four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon because they start to feel anxious about what the week ahead might hold for them. I put in place a Sunday-afternoon routine that helped me alleviate some of that anxiety.”
Mrs Webb said she had learnt to enforce strict routines around time she was prepared to spend on work outside classroom hours.
“I would say ‘Right, this is the weekend, I can afford to spend 90 minutes on schoolwork’,” she said.
After that time Mrs Webb would put her schoolwork away and return to family time.
Mrs Webb said she was now able to re-engage with teaching with a renewed energy and a different focus.
She is much more aware of the need to protect work-life balance, and understands what is needed to self-regulate and make the job sustainable.
For Mrs Webb, Teachers Cry Too reaffirms hope and a strong belief that teaching is “a vocation of privilege”.
“There is little that I can think of that is more rewarding than the opportunity to walk alongside young people as they learn more about themselves and learn to participate in life,” she said.
