Progress Notes Note Required: A Peer Support Collective for Mental Health Professionals
Progress Notes Not Required: A Peer Support Collective for Mental Health Professionals is a place for therapists and other mental health professionals to just… be. This is a community. A place for those working in the mental health field to decompress, get peer support, and build community. This is a space for us to get away from the pressure of CEUs, networking, supervision, and (and more importantly) progress notes. This is a space for us to build community with likeminded individuals, with people who understand, and a space for us to talk with no filter. This is not therapy. This is not networking. This is not supervision. This is a space to be ourselves and discuss the bad, and good, of being in the mental health field.
Why a peer support group? Because being a therapist, or working in the mental health field in general, can be a very lonely thing. We are treated like we can handle everything, and told to ignore our own emotions. We are told to just go to therapy ourselves. But the reality is that individual therapy doesn’t solve absolutely everything. We know as mental health professionals that building community is important. But unfortunately we are not given the opportunity to build a community of people that understand what this type of work is really like. We are sold CEUs, clinical supervision, and events for networking. But not community to just be ourselves and discuss the good and bad of this field of work. Our significant others and friends don’t truly understand the gravity of this type of work. And it’s just too hard to explain the weight that we hold for others.
This is our space. A space to be us. Raw and unfiltered. A space to celebrate and a space to grieve. A space for individuals that understand the struggles of caring for others, when there is very little support for all the extra baggage we hold for our clients.
Peer support groups are free to join.
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Anyone working in the mental health field as therapists, case managers, substance abuse counselors, discharge planners, or other support staff directly working with clients.
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We plan to create sub-groups based on specialty/population/interest as this group grows. We plan to start a book club and also aim to have in-person gatherings.
To join the group, click the button below:
Who We Are
Danielle Oetjen, MA, LPC
Owner of Neurodivergent & Co, Counseling, LLC
Danielle enjoys slowing down and resetting through reading, cooking, caring for plants, painting, baking, podcasts, audiobooks, and intentional sensory accommodations. Floor time counts. Letting her brain wander without trying to optimize it does too. Her music tastes range from classical to progressive metal, alternative, post-hardcore, R&B, and hip-hop (sometimes grounding, sometimes just loud enough to reset the nervous system) She enjoys board games, tabletop and card games (from Magic: The Gathering to Phase 10 to Spades), along with video games like The Sims, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Dreamlight Valley, and Tetris. She gravitates toward true crime, history (especially BIPOC-centered history), and science media, including physics and big-picture questions. Her reading includes fantasy, poetry, forensic psychology, and philosophy, especially existentialism (even if she never spells it right).
Danielle is passionate about social justice, LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent advocacy, and developing a more compassionate understanding of executive functioning. She also cares deeply about the realities of living and working with chronic illness, including how pacing, accessibility, energy management, and invisible symptoms shape daily life and professional identity. Progress Notes Not Required exists to name the invisible labor of mental health work, the cognitive load, emotional labor, ethical weight, and background processing that never make it into progress notes or supervision and gaining support through peers.
You can find Danielle at www.ndcocounseling.com
Nicole Wilmot, LCSW
Owner of Nature’s Wisdom Ecotherapy, LLC.
Nicole finds joy in going to concerts, baking (yes, sourdough), spending time outside, tv, and movies. She recently decided to learn how to crochet, and that has been a tangled mess of a journey so far; but oh, so fun! Nicole really enjoys reading everything from thrillers, fantasy, classics, psychology, true crime, and yes, sometimes a little smut; big emphasis on banned books. Nicole listens to all sorts of music: rock, alternative, post-hardcore and pop punk (it was never a phase), reggae, folk, oldies, jazz, and even sometimes classical. She does enjoy video games, but current and recent obsessions have been Dreamlight Valley, Animal Crossing, Potion Craft, Sims, and of course BG3. Nicole is highly passionate about the environment, sustainability, spirituality, social and ecological justice, and human rights. Nicole has had a desire to start a group like this since grad school, when she learned from her professors the reality of being in this field. A strong belief that therapists need peer support just as much as anyone has been a driving force behind the work put into starting this peer support group.
You can find Nicole at www.natureswisdomecotherapy.com