It Has Been Zero Days Since Someone Cried in My Office (and one of those someones was me)
A public health professional traces the lingering moral injury shaped by preventable harm, institutional betrayal, and the erosion of trust.
We continue our series of đLove Letters to Public Health with a lyrical tribute from a public health practitioner whose office door has seen too much grief passing through.
Lisa Brodsky, MPH knows all too well the accumulation of moral injury* within the public health workforce. In this personal narrative, she bears witness to the tears, the targets painted on backs, and the ghosts that linger long after harm has been done.
If youâd like to follow Lisaâs lead and share your own love letter to public health or another reflection on these complicated times, Iâd love to hear from you.
Like all the articles in The Public Health Workforce is Not OK newsletter, this is not intended to be a monologue. This newsletter welcomes discussion, dialogue, disagreement, and amplification.
Please comment, like, share, recommend, subscribe, or get in touch!
It Has Been Zero Days Since Someone Cried in My Office (and one of those someones was me) - Love Letter #14
By Lisa Brodsky, MPH
It wasnât on my Outlook calendar. Crying doesnât follow a schedule.
It happens after meetings where decisions are framed as unavoidable.
It happens after guidance changes arrive without explanation. Or, after phone calls with people whom you no longer know you can trust.
It belongs to staff who have had targets painted on their backs for no cause beyond the fact that they care. The paint is never wet, yet it stains.
It belongs to parents carrying fears that prevention was supposed to erase, until prevention itself became the thing erased.
And sometimes, it belongs to the person whose office it isâinjured by what they are required to witness but cannot fix.
By the time I entered public health, I already understood that inheritance is not only blood or story but atmosphereâsomething we breathe without noticing like air. The ghosts I learned to recognize in family histories welcomed me there too. They were waiting patiently for me, woven quietly into policy, practice, and the fragile architecture of trust.
Moral injury arrives this way. Quietly. Indirectly. Like a ghost you donât believe in until it keeps returning. Haunting the halls. Rattling its chains. It doesnât announce itself. And, it doesnât leave a paper trail.
It arrives when political interference, institutional silence, and erosion of trust reshape what prevention is allowed to beâand the damage rarely appears in reports or on fancy data dashboards.
Instead, it shows up in offices, in bodies, in the quiet collapse of certainty about what protecting the public is supposed to mean.
So, what if the structures we trusted were not neutralâand what if that betrayal leaves a wound?
What if moral injury behaves like a ghostâsomething that lingers in bodies and institutions, long after the harm occurs, shaping systems, silences, and survival in ways we have not yet learned to name?
And what if it lingers in what goes unsaidâin futures prevention was meant to protect? In the feeling that something essential has been eliminated and cannot simply be put back?
Because there is no return.
*Moral injury is what happens when the people who entered public health to help others find ourselves unable to prevent harm, unable to uphold our values, or betrayed by the very institutions that we believed were serving the public good. Moral injury can create grief, anger, disillusionment, and a lasting sense of loss for what public health could and should be. For more information on moral injury, see here, here, or here.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the views of any organization, employer, or institution with which they are affiliated.
đ Action steps
â¨Starting in honour of MLK Day, all newsletter authors are invited to share action steps. We compile all suggestions into the Resistance Action page that we have been building since we started. â¨
If you would like to use your voice to speak up in support of public health professionals experiencing moral injury, consider taking the following steps:
Name what you are experiencing. Burnout is real, but it is not the only wound. If you are carrying grief, ethical distress, or a deep sense of having been prevented from doing what you were trained to do, that has a name: moral injury. Naming it is the first step toward addressing it.
Make space for the hard conversations. If you are a manager or a leader, consider what it would take to create a culture where fear, frustration, and ethical distress can be spoken aloud â without shame, without consequence, and without being reframed as a performance problem.
Hold institutions accountable for the conditions that make trust possible. Transparency, expertise, consistency, and honest communication are not luxuries. They are the architecture of public health. Advocate for them wherever you have a platform to do so.
Stay present for your colleagues in public health in the long aftermath. Crises end, but trauma lingers. Check in on your colleagues not only when the acute emergency is visible, but in the months that follow, when the exhaustion has nowhere left to hide.
Lisa Brodsky, MPH is a public health director, writer, and MFA candidate with more than 25 years of experience in maternal and child health, emergency preparedness, communicable disease response, and community well-being. Her writing explores moral injury, institutional trust, grief, and the emotional aftershocks that emerge when the systems meant to safeguard communities begin to fracture. These themes also shape her speculative memoir manuscript, Linger: A Convergence of Family, Memory, and Superstition, which examines inheritance, ritual, and the lingering presence of personal and collective trauma. She came to public health believing that prevention could profoundly change the trajectory of people's lives, and that what never happens often matters just as much as what does.
If you would like to share your perspective on public health right now in this Newsletter written TO and FOR and BY and ABOUT the public health workforce, we are currently running three series:
đ˘ Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health
Opinion pieces grounded in lived experienceđ Love Letters to Public Health
Poetry, prose, visual art, or other creative formatsđŞ Resignation Letters
Real or imagined correspondence documenting what is happening to our people and our institutions in real time
Please get in touch if you would like to submit a draft to any of these series. I will work closely with you to prepare it for publication. Review previous instalments for examples. I will offer you my personal promise of confidentiality if requested.
Lots more information on how to share your story is available here:
I close by emphasising what I said in a previous newsletter:
âAt this time of uncertainty for the public health workforce, letâs remember our commitment to science and evidence and data. We know that validating emotions and baggage has a place too, but we need to be able to identify them and distinguish opinion from fact.
Letâs recommit to kindness and mutual support for the public health workforce and beyond. If leaders are trying to sow divisions among us, the best we can do is to respond with empathy, and by strengthening, connecting, and lifting up one another.
Right now, the best I can offer my fellow public health professionals is a place* to gather and reflect and share and vent and organize and ask questions and offer support to one another. Weâre going to need that now more than ever.â
*This is a plug for the Public Health Connections Lounge on LinkedIn, where we seek to build community and conversation among public health professionals. Join us.
If you are new around here, Welcome to The Public Health Workforce is Not OK! In this newsletter, I share frank insights and start conversations about the experiences of building a public health career. You can get to know me here and here. Please subscribe, review the action steps and the archive, and join the conversations in the Lounge. I am committed to keeping this newsletter free for job seekers (at least, for as long as I still have a job).
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