The Mental Health Crisis Causing Teachers to Quit

Teachers are leaving careers they love in a last-ditch effort to save their mental health. How did we get here?

Lesley Allen will never know what triggered her final panic attack last fall.

She was outside supervising a group of students during a mask break at her middle school in South Berwick, Maine, when she felt a sense of overwhelming dread. Her anxiety spiked, her heart thumped out of her chest and her left arm went numb. I’m having a heart attack, she thought.

But before she could drag herself to the nurse’s office, she had to find someone to watch her sixth grade class.

This story also appeared in The New Republic

It wasn’t the first time she’d felt like this. After a previous episode a few weeks before, her doctor put her on a heart monitor and ordered a cardiac ultrasound. The results were normal. Her heart was fine. It was another panic attack, her doctor confirmed. Unlike anxiety, panic attacks often have no trigger. They can pop up out of nowhere, frequently accompanied by feelings of intense fear, along with physical symptoms like a racing heartbeat, chest pain and difficulty breathing.

Allen’s panic attack on the blacktop was her third—all of them had taken place since the pandemic began, and two of them at school.

“My doctor said, ‘You need to do something. This keeps happening,’” she recalls.

Read the full feature on EdSurge.