Burnout vs. Depression in Driven Women: The Clinical Difference That Changes Everything
Burnout and depression look strikingly similar. But they’re not the same condition, and treating one as the other can make things significantly worse. This post walks through the clinical distinctions, the neurobiology, and the specific way both show up in driven women who are used to pushing through everything. If you’ve been refilling a prescription and still wondering if something else is going on, this is for you.
Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Prescription She Keeps Refilling
- What Are Burnout and Depression, Clinically?
- The Neurobiology: What’s Actually Happening in Your Body?
- How Does Each One Show Up in Driven Women?
- What Happens When Burnout and Depression Show Up at Once?
- Both/And: They Can Coexist. And Each Makes the Other Worse
- The Systemic Lens: The System That Burns You Out Will Tell You You’re Depressed
- How Do You Heal When the Sequence Matters?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Burnout and depression share significant symptom overlap but differ in causes and treatment pathways in ways that matter critically for driven women who are frequently misdiagnosed. Burnout is a context-specific occupational syndrome that typically lifts when the demand environment changes; depression doesn’t, and treating one as the other can actively delay recovery. In my work with driven women, the most consequential clinical confusion I see is antidepressants prescribed for what is actually a nervous system that needs rest and relational repair.
In short: Burnout is context-specific exhaustion that eases when the demand environment changes, while depression is a pervasive mood disorder that persists across settings and needs a different clinical response.
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Over more than 15,000 clinical hours, distinguishing burnout from depression has been one of the highest-stakes assessments I make, particularly with driven women whose symptoms can look nearly identical before the clinical picture is fully drawn. The World Health Organization formally classified burnout as an occupational phenomenon in ICD-11, explicitly distinguishing it from depressive disorders while acknowledging the significant symptom overlap that makes differential diagnosis so challenging (World Health Organization 2019).
The Prescription She Keeps Refilling
| Dimension | Burnout | Clinical Depression |
|---|---|---|
| Causal mechanism | Environmental. Burnout is the result of chronic demand exceeding available resources without adequate recovery; the environment is primarily generating the symptoms. | Neurobiological and psychological. Depression involves altered neurotransmitter function, cognitive patterns, and often significant biological loading independent of current environmental demands. |
| Diagnostic status | Not a DSM diagnostic category. Burnout is a syndrome recognized by the WHO in occupational contexts but is not a clinical diagnosis in the way depression is. | A formal diagnosis. Major Depressive Disorder and its variants are DSM-5 diagnoses with established diagnostic criteria, evidence-based treatments, and clinical frameworks. |
| Response to environmental change | When the environment changes. When the demand reduces, real rest becomes possible, and structural changes are made. Burnout typically improves meaningfully. | Depression doesn’t necessarily remit with environmental improvement. The neurobiological and psychological components require active clinical intervention beyond circumstantial change. |
| Anhedonia | Burnout often preserves the memory of pleasure. Clients know what they used to enjoy and can imagine enjoying it again; the tank is empty but desire isn’t absent. | Depression characteristically produces anhedonia. The genuine inability to experience pleasure in things that genuinely mattered, which goes beyond exhaustion into a flatness that rest doesn’t lift. |
| Treatment | Environmental change, rest, and often therapy to address the patterns and identity issues that led to the overextension. But the environmental change must happen for recovery to hold. | Clinical intervention. Therapy (often CBT, ACT, or trauma-informed approaches), and sometimes medication; treatment addresses the neurobiological and psychological processes, rather than the circumstances alone. |
| The misdiagnosis problem | Burnout is frequently labeled depression. Which matters because pure pharmacological treatment of what is primarily an environmental problem doesn’t produce recovery if the environment doesn’t change. | Depression is frequently attributed to burnout. Particularly in driven women. Which delays appropriate clinical treatment while the person tries to ‘rest their way’ out of a clinical condition. |
It’s a Sunday night, and Heather is sitting at her kitchen island with a glass of water and the familiar orange bottle of escitalopram in front of her. She’s 47, a partner at a global consulting firm, and she’s been refilling this prescription for two years now, mostly without thinking about it. Does it help? She honestly can’t tell. Is she depressed, or is she just living the wrong life at a volume she can no longer sustain? Sitting there, she can’t find the line between those two things.
Four years since a real vacation. Awake at 4 a.m. most mornings, staring at the ceiling. A hum of expectation that doesn’t go quiet even on a Saturday. She knows all of this. She also knows two of her peers left the firm last year citing “mental health reasons,” and Heather has quietly decided she will not be that person. So she refills the prescription, a small private agreement to keep going, even as the floor underneath her feels less steady every month.
What Heather doesn’t know yet is that she may be treating the wrong thing entirely.
In my work with driven women in therapy, this is one of the most consequential clinical confusions I see, and it’s the one I want to spend this whole piece on. Burnout and depression get collapsed into each other, and then the wrong intervention gets applied to the wrong condition. A woman who is burned out doesn’t need an antidepressant as her primary treatment. A woman who is clinically depressed doesn’t need a sabbatical as hers. The distinction matters enormously, and getting it right is the first real step toward getting better.
What Are Burnout and Depression, Clinically?
These two conditions share significant symptom overlap, which is exactly why they get confused so often. But their definitions, causes, and treatment pathways diverge in ways that matter.
Defined by Christina Maslach, PhD, social psychologist and burnout researcher at the University of California Berkeley, as an occupational syndrome characterized by three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (profound depletion of emotional and physical resources), depersonalization or cynicism toward one’s work, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 recognizes burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
In plain terms: Burnout is what happens when your job takes more than you have to give, for long enough that your nervous system stops regenerating. The key clinical feature: it’s tied to work. Take the work away (genuinely), and you start to come back.
Depression, by contrast, is a clinical syndrome with specific diagnostic criteria defined in the DSM-5. It requires a persistent depressed mood or anhedonia, a loss of pleasure or interest, for at least two weeks, alongside other symptoms: significant weight changes, sleep disturbance, psychomotor changes, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, trouble concentrating, and recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation.
The most important clinical difference? Depression follows you. It comes on vacation. It sits beside you at your daughter’s recital. It doesn’t care that it’s Saturday. Burnout is contextually tied. Leave the stressor, and the nervous system has a fighting chance to recover.
A core feature of clinical depression, anhedonia is the markedly diminished ability to experience pleasure or interest in activities that once brought enjoyment. Anhedonia limited to work suggests burnout; anhedonia that reaches into every domain of life, relationships, hobbies, even vacations, is a stronger indicator of clinical depression.
In plain terms: If you still enjoy your morning run, your book club, and your kids, but dread everything about your job, that’s more likely burnout. If nothing feels good anymore, not even the things that used to matter most, take that seriously as possible depression.
It’s also worth naming what isn’t a useful differentiator: severity. Both conditions can be severe. Both can make it hard to get out of bed. Both can strain relationships and impair your work. Severity alone won’t tell you which one you’re facing.
The Neurobiology: What’s Actually Happening in Your Body?
Burnout and depression share common neurobiological signatures, which is another reason they’re so easy to conflate. Both involve dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the body’s primary stress-response system. Both can produce elevated or eventually blunted cortisol, disrupted sleep architecture, increased inflammatory markers, and shifts in immune function. But their trajectory differs sharply.
Burnout, as described by Wilmar Schaufeli, PhD, work and organizational psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University, arises from sustained workplace demands that outrun a person’s resources over time, a mismatch between what the job asks and what she has to give. When the chronic stressor is removed or meaningfully reduced, recovery is often possible. The nervous system can regenerate.
Depression involves neurobiological maintenance factors that can persist long after the environmental stressor is gone. This is why a physician who takes a three-month leave of absence can come back feeling exactly as hollow as when she left. The antidepressant may be steadying her neurochemistry, but the was-this-burnout-or-depression question never actually got answered. And if what she was carrying was burnout layered over depression, the leave addressed neither. She rested, nothing lifted, and now she quietly believes rest doesn’t work for her.
Disruption of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the body’s primary stress-response cascade. Chronic stress dysregulates cortisol rhythm, alters immune function, disrupts sleep, and eventually produces inflammatory changes in the brain itself. Both burnout and clinical depression alter HPA function, through different mechanisms and with different recovery trajectories.
In plain terms: Both conditions stress your body’s stress-management system. The difference is what caused the dysregulation and whether it will resolve with rest or requires targeted clinical treatment. Or both.
The researcher I keep coming back to here is Gordon Parker, MD, PhD, DSc, psychiatrist and founder of the Black Dog Institute at the University of New South Wales, whose work focuses specifically on telling burnout and clinical depression apart. What he documents is the thing I see in session every week: these two conditions share surface features, but their underlying mechanisms and their best treatments diverge sharply. Conflate them, and you end up with two undertreated problems instead of one that’s actually handled.
How Does Each One Show Up in Driven Women?
Driven women tend to carry an unusually high pain threshold for occupational suffering. They’ve been rewarded for pushing through, in school, in training, in the early grind of a career, and the pattern grooves in deep. By the time burnout or depression is clinically significant, it’s usually been building quietly for years, hidden underneath a performance that still looks flawless from the outside.
Here’s how burnout tends to show up. Brittany is 39, a VP of engineering at a Series B startup, running 70-hour weeks for six months straight. She lost her senior engineer in the spring and has been covering that role herself while trying, without much luck, to hire a replacement. She’s exhausted. She’s short with people she loves. She’s gone cynical about a company she used to describe with real affection. For the first time in a career built on competence, she feels ineffective, and it frightens her.
And yet. Brittany still looks forward to her Saturday morning run. She still lights up when her daughter calls from college. She can still lose a whole quiet Sunday to a novel and surface happy. Her flatness is aimed squarely at her work and nowhere else. That specificity is clinically meaningful, and it’s the detail I’d underline in her chart. It points toward burnout as the primary frame, not depression.
What Brittany needs first is genuine rest. Not a weekend. A real break, followed by structural changes to how her job is built. An antidepressant might help with symptoms at the edges, but it won’t close the gap between what her job demands and what she has to give. For her, rest isn’t indulgence. It’s the treatment.
Depression in driven women usually looks different. Quieter. More pervasive. Harder to pin to any one cause, because it isn’t coming from one. It follows the woman everywhere. The executive who takes a coaching engagement and finds she can’t absorb the material. The physician who vacations and comes home just as hollow. The attorney who genuinely can’t recall the last time she felt anything other than flat.
The key clinical marker is simple, and it’s the one I listen for hardest: when rest doesn’t touch it, pay attention.
What Happens When Burnout and Depression Show Up at Once?
Here’s the distinction I hold in my head when I’m sitting with a driven woman trying to sort this out. Burnout arrives as depletion, the body’s protest against a life lived at full throttle with no restoration. Depression arrives as dimming, a loss of color and meaning that stays put even when she finally rests.
For a lot of driven women, though, the honest answer isn’t either/or. Burnout and depression are frequently comorbid, each feeds the other, and what shows up in my office is a picture messier than either diagnosis alone would predict.
Angela is 51, a chief medical officer at a regional hospital system. When she first came to therapy, she attributed all of it to burnout, and honestly, a lot of it was. The administrative load had become crushing. She’d been doing the work of three people for two years. But as we kept meeting, something underneath came into view. Her burnout was sitting on top of a major depressive episode that predated the demanding role entirely. The job had worsened a depression that was already there, and the depression had deepened the cynicism and hopelessness in a way that pure burnout, on its own, rarely does.
Angela needed both things at once. Treatment for the depression, which meant medication and therapy together, and structural changes to how she worked. Treat only the depression, and she’d go right back into the same unsustainable environment and relapse fast. Treat only the burnout, and the depression underneath would keep her from having the neurological bandwidth to make any real change at all.
I see this pattern consistently. When burnout and depression coexist, both need treatment, but the depression usually goes first. It is far harder to renegotiate unsustainable working conditions when your own neurobiology is being pulled sideways by clinical depression. Once there’s a stable floor underneath her, a driven woman’s capacity to see her situation clearly and change it goes up considerably.
Both/And: They Can Coexist. And Each Makes the Other Worse
The Both/And framing matters enormously here, and it’s often a relief to the driven woman who has been quietly interrogating herself about which one she has. The answer may genuinely be both. That isn’t a failure of diagnostic clarity. It’s an accurate picture of how a nervous system behaves under sustained pressure, AND it’s a reason to be gentler with yourself, not harder.
What I watch happen, over and over, is this. Driven women are especially vulnerable to the comorbid version because they push straight through the early burnout signals, and that pushing-through is exactly what manufactures the chronic stress that can trigger or worsen depression. The sequence is almost always the same. Exhaustion gets treated as a scheduling problem instead of a clinical one. She works harder, sleeps less, borrows against a reserve that was already thin. Her stress-response system keeps firing with no off switch. The neurobiological bill comes due, and what began as burnout quietly opens a door to depression.
Stephanie is 44, a senior partner at a major law firm, and she described this progression to me almost word for word. “I thought I was just tired,” she said in one of our first sessions. “I didn’t realize tired could go on for three years and turn into something that didn’t lift even when I took time off.” By the time she found her way to therapy, she was carrying both at once: the structural burnout from a caseload no human could sustain, and a clinical depression that was never going to resolve just because she took two weeks in August.
Both/And here means the burnout is real, and the depression is real, and you don’t have to choose. You do have to treat both, in the right order. That’s the whole game.
The Systemic Lens: The System That Burns You Out Will Tell You You’re Depressed
There’s a systemic layer to this confusion that I think driven women deserve to see plainly, because it’s often operating on them without their knowledge.
Healthcare systems, law firms, tech companies, consulting firms: many have a structural incentive to medicalize distress. When a driven woman starts to struggle, there’s a strong institutional pull toward handing her a diagnosis, usually depression, and a prescription, usually an SSRI, that lets her return to the exact conditions that broke her down. What that quietly accomplishes is a transfer of responsibility, from the organization’s design to her neurochemistry. The problem gets relocated from the building to her brain.
The person who has named this most clearly is Christina Maslach, PhD, the social psychologist whose research defined the Maslach Burnout Inventory and shaped how the field understands the syndrome. She has been unambiguous about it for decades: burnout is an organizational problem, not an individual failing. And the institution that manufactured the conditions is never held to account when the label handed out is depression and the fix offered is medication management.
“Burnout is not a problem of the people themselves, but of the social environment in which they work.”
Christina Maslach, PhD, social psychologist and co-author of The Truth About Burnout
This lands harder on women, and here’s what I keep seeing. A woman’s occupational distress gets read as internal pathology, a mood disorder, rather than as a response to a structure. A man struggling in the same environment is more likely to have the conditions of his job questioned. A woman is more likely to walk out with a diagnosis and a prescription and the quiet implication that she simply couldn’t hack it.
None of this means medication is wrong. Very often it’s exactly right, and sometimes it is genuinely life-saving. It means that if you’re a driven woman inside these questions, it’s worth asking a few of your own. Is system-level pressure being handed a person-level diagnosis? Is the real problem being named out loud? And if the antidepressant makes you functional enough to return to the same environment, is that your healing, or the institution getting what it needed?
The Fixing the Foundations™ course addresses exactly this kind of systemic pattern. Helping driven women understand the difference between a wound and a workplace, and what each actually requires.
How Do You Heal When the Sequence Matters?
Healing from burnout, depression, or both asks for a thoughtful, sequenced approach, and the sequence is where most people go wrong. Here’s what I recommend clinically.
1. Assess what’s primary. If your symptoms are mostly work-specific, the exhaustion, the cynicism, the sense of diminished efficacy, and you notice real improvement on weekends or during genuine time off, burnout is likely the dominant frame. The work then centers on your actual working conditions, rather than on managing symptoms while the conditions stay intact.
2. Evaluate for depression separately. If symptoms are pervasive, persist even when you’re away from work, include neurovegetative changes (significant appetite or sleep shifts unrelated to work stress), or carry a general hopelessness about the future, pursue a thorough clinical evaluation. This is best done with a psychiatrist or a therapist with diagnostic training.
3. If both are present, treat depression first. It is far harder to do the structural work of burnout recovery when clinical depression is unaddressed. Depression narrows your cognitive bandwidth, dampens your motivation, and makes the very steps burnout recovery requires feel impossible. Stabilize the neurobiological foundation first.
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4. Don’t let medication be the whole answer. Antidepressants can be genuinely helpful, sometimes essential. But medication on its own does not process the grief of what your role has extracted from you. It doesn’t change the structural conditions that created the burnout. It doesn’t help you renegotiate your relationship with authority, with ambition, or with the institution that quietly organized your whole life around its needs. Therapy does that work. Executive coaching, once the clinical foundation is stable, builds on top of it.
5. Build in genuine structural change. If the working conditions that caused the burnout don’t change, the cycle repeats. That means boundaries, delegation, and renegotiating workload, and sometimes it means harder questions about whether the role, the organization, or the profession itself is sustainable. That conversation is often where the deepest healing happens.
If you’re sitting somewhere in the fog between burnout and depression as you read this, here’s the one thing I most want you to hear. The fog is real, and it’s worth more than a refilled prescription and a quiet return to the same conditions. What the moment actually calls for is an accurate clinical picture and a treatment approach built to fit what is genuinely happening to you, rather than what is most convenient for everyone around you.
A note on safety: If you’re having thoughts of self-harm or suicidal ideation, even fleeting ones, please reach out for help right away. Contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988), or go to your nearest emergency room. Thoughts like these are a signal of clinical severity that calls for immediate attention, not a sabbatical and not a wait-and-see.
You can also connect with my practice to explore whether therapy, executive coaching, or a combination is the right fit for where you are now.
What Do Driven Women Get Wrong About Rest, Recovery, and Asking for Help?
In my work with driven women, whether they’re physicians, tech executives, attorneys, or entrepreneurs, I notice the same thing over and over when it comes to burnout and depression. The barrier to getting accurate help is rarely a lack of resources. It’s a set of deeply held beliefs about what asking for help means, what rest is allowed to look like, and what counts as a legitimate reason to slow down. Let me take the most common ones head-on.
“I can’t slow down right now. There’s too much at stake.” The belief underneath is that slowing down will cost more than pushing through. In an acute crisis, that’s sometimes temporarily true. But as a permanent operating mode, “I can’t slow down” usually isn’t a description of reality. It’s a belief system, often installed long before your current role. The women most resistant to slowing down are frequently the ones whose early environments taught them their value was conditional on their output. The urgency feels real. It isn’t always accurate.
“I just need to push through this quarter.” The quarterly logic of professional life is one of the most effective engines of sustained burnout. There’s always another quarter, another deliverable, another reason this isn’t the moment for rest. Burnout that progresses into depression tends to happen in exactly this frame, because each single quarter feels manageable enough that the accumulating damage never gets addressed. By the time she stops, or is forced to stop, recovery is measured in years, not weeks.
“What I’m experiencing isn’t bad enough to need help.” Driven women hold an extraordinarily high threshold for what counts as “bad enough.” What would register as an emergency signal for most people lands as moderate discomfort for someone trained to push through everything. That’s not strength. It’s an impaired alarm system. One of the most useful things therapy offers is recalibration: learning to respond to early distress signals instead of waiting until the whole system breaks down.
“Getting help means I failed.” This is perhaps the most consequential belief of all. Driven women often carry a deep, sometimes unconscious equation between needing nothing and being admirable, and asking for help reads as a threat to that identity. Here’s the clinical reality I watch play out. The women in my practice making the most meaningful progress are almost universally the ones who sought help early and updated their idea of what strength actually requires. Getting help doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re taking your life seriously enough to give it what it needs.
What I see consistently, and what the research on recovery confirms, is that early intervention produces dramatically better outcomes than waiting until the situation is unmistakably critical. The woman who reaches for support at 60% capacity recovers faster and more completely than the woman who waits until she’s running at 20% and has lost real relational, professional, and physical ground on the way down.
If you’re feeling reluctant to take the next step, to schedule the appointment or look into therapy, I want to name that reluctance as information, not as wisdom. The part of you saying “not yet, I can handle this” may be the very part that was trained to ignore your own signals. The part of you that went looking for an article like this one is probably the part that already knows something needs to change, and it’s worth listening to. Figuring out which part is telling you the truth is exactly what therapy is for.
There’s also the question of what you model for the people watching you. Your colleagues, your children, the younger driven women who look to you for some quiet signal of how this is done. When you seek help, name what’s hard, and get support rather than pushing through in silence, you give the people around you permission to do the same. In a culture built on silence, one woman doing it differently changes what feels possible for everyone.
You came here because something in this resonated, and that resonance is worth following. Reach out when you’re ready, or even a few weeks before you feel ready. That’s usually the right time.
Warmly, Annie
Q: How do I tell the difference between burnout and depression?
A: The most useful question to ask is whether it follows you. Burnout is contextually specific: you feel the exhaustion and cynicism mainly around work, and real time away offers some relief. Depression is pervasive and shows up everywhere, even on vacation. If two weeks off leaves you exactly as hollow, get evaluated for depression.
Q: Can you have both burnout and depression at the same time?
A: Yes, and this is common for driven women. Burnout and depression frequently co-occur, and each worsens the other. Chronic workplace stress creates the neurobiological conditions that can deepen depression, and depression makes the executive functioning needed to address burnout harder to reach. When both are present, the usual recommendation is to treat the depression first.
Q: Will antidepressants help with burnout?
A: Antidepressants treat clinical depression by addressing neurochemical imbalances, so they won’t resolve the structural and environmental factors that cause burnout. For pure burnout without comorbid depression, genuine rest and working-condition changes are far more effective than medication. For burnout with comorbid depression, medication may help, but as part of a broader approach.
Q: Do I need to quit my job to recover from burnout?
A: Not necessarily. Burnout recovery often involves clearer boundaries, real delegation, advocating for structural changes in your current role, and taking a meaningful leave. Sometimes a job change is warranted, but many women recover fully without leaving. The real question is whether the conditions can change enough to allow recovery.
Q: Why do I still feel flat and hopeless even on vacation?
A: This is one of the clearest clinical signals that you may be dealing with depression rather than, or alongside, burnout. Depression is pervasive; it doesn’t stay at the office. If genuine time away from work doesn’t lift the flatness, take that seriously and pursue a clinical evaluation for depression.
Q: Is burnout a real clinical diagnosis?
A: Burnout is recognized by the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress. It’s not currently a formal diagnosis in the DSM-5. That gap has real consequences: burnout often gets coded as depression, which can lead to medication-first approaches that never address the structural conditions driving the problem.
Q: Should I see a psychiatrist or a therapist for burnout?
A: For burnout, a trauma-informed therapist or executive coach who understands occupational stress is often the best starting point. If comorbid depression is suspected, a psychiatric evaluation can clarify whether medication is indicated. The most comprehensive approach often involves both: a therapist for the psychological and structural work, and a psychiatrist for neurobiological stabilization.
Q: How long does burnout recovery actually take?
A: Recovery varies with severity, how long it’s been building, and how thoroughly the conditions change. For mild to moderate burnout with genuine rest and working-condition changes, recovery can take weeks to months. For severe or long-standing burnout, especially with comorbid depression, it’s more often months to a year or more.
Related Reading
Maslach, Christina, and Michael P. Leiter. The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It. Jossey-Bass, 2016.
Parker, Gordon, and Gabriela Tavella. “Distinguishing Burnout from Clinical Depression: A Theoretical Differentiation Template.” Journal of Affective Disorders 281 (2021): 168, 173. DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.12.022.
Schonfeld, Irvin Sam, and Renzo Bianchi. “From Burnout to Occupational Depression.” Frontiers in Public Health 9 (2021): 796401. DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.796401.
Koutsimani, Panagiota, Anthony Montgomery, and Katerina Georganta. “The Relationship Between Burnout, Depression, and Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 284. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00284.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Montgomery A, Panagopoulou E, Esmail A, Richards T, Maslach C. Burnout in healthcare: the case for organisational change. BMJ. 2019;366:l4774. doi:10.1136/bmj.l4774. PMID: 31362957.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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A note on how this piece was made: Annie writes and clinically reviews this content. AI tools assist with drafting and research support under her direction, and every published piece reflects her clinical judgment and her voice. See our editorial policy for more.
This article is educational and is not therapy, diagnosis, or treatment, and it does not create a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of self-harm, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or go to your nearest emergency room.
