Beyond the Medical Model: Soul Exhaustion and Soul Care

Join the Northwest ATTC and suicide prevention expert Sarah W. Gaer, MA, for this one-hour FREE webinar about soul exhaustion and soul care.

Across cultures and throughout history, the concept of the soul—the essence of who we are—has held profound significance. Yet contemporary approaches to mental health often emphasize symptoms, diagnoses, and treatment, leaving less room to explore the deeper dimensions of human experience. While the medical model has contributed enormously to our understanding and treatment of mental illness, it does not always fully capture the complexity of identity, purpose, meaning, and connection.

Centered on lived and living experience, Soul Exhaustion and Soul Care offers a non-pathologizing framework for exploring how life experiences affect the whole person. Soul Exhaustion describes a deep sense of depletion that can emerge through persistent adversity, trauma, disconnection, caregiving, chronic illness, discrimination, profound loss, and struggles associated with gambling or substance use. It invites us to consider not only how people are functioning, but how their experiences may be affecting their sense of who they are.

Building on this understanding, Soul Care explores intentional ways of reconnecting with meaning, purpose, identity, and relationships. Through reflection, boundary-setting, forgiveness, connection, and self-discovery, the framework encourages individuals to attend to the parts of themselves that may have been neglected, diminished, or lost.
Rather than challenging the value of clinical treatment, this presentation gently questions whether our current language and approaches adequately reflect the depth and complexity of human suffering. Participants will be introduced to a complementary perspective that broadens our understanding of well-being and encourages us to care not only for how people feel or function, but for who they are.