Forensic DNA analysts spend years learning how to handle evidence. They are not typically taught how to handle what the evidence represents. The bodies, the children, the families waiting — all of it moves through the lab and out the door with the case file, but it does not always leave the analyst.
That gap was at the center of a wellness panel at ISHI 36, where Jen Dillon, Sharon Powlakowski, Tracie Webb, and Brian Hoey spent an hour with host Jordan Villanueva talking through what burnout actually looks like in a DNA lab, why the field has been better at naming stress than addressing it, and what analysts and leaders can do differently. Between them, the panelists bring more than 90 years of experience in forensic science, law enforcement psychology, and lab leadership.
What burnout looks like — and why it hides
Dillon, who spent 17 years as a forensic scientist before moving into wellness work at the Michigan State Police, described burnout as a specific form of workplace stress that shows up in three ways: depersonalization or cynicism, physical and emotional exhaustion, and a loss of value in the work. In practice, it looks like absenteeism, withdrawal, irritability, and quiet quitting. It also looks like avoidance.
“When a case was particularly difficult for me and I was actually processing trauma, I didn’t want to work on the case,” Dillon said. “When that’s happening over a long extended period of time, it’s tough.”
Powlakowski, a DNA analyst at the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory with more than 30 years on the bench, pointed to the structural sources of stress that never go away: changing technology, courtroom testimony, the weight of knowing that mistakes have real consequences, and caseload backlogs that create a constant low-grade pressure to produce.
“It’s a never-ending grind of stress,” Powlakowski said. “Get these things done, get them out, make sure they’re right and away you go.”
Webb, the chief police psychologist for the Michigan State Police Office of Behavioral Science, noted that stress shows up across every dimension of who a person is — sleep, eating, relationships, immune function, and what she called the spirit: the sense of whether the world is a safe and reasonable place. Sustained exposure to the worst of what people do to each other can quietly erode that.
The regulator nobody teaches
Analysts in forensic DNA work are trained to compartmentalize. It is part of doing the job — scientists hold a neutral position, separate from the prosecution, the defense, and the police. What that training does not address is what happens after the shift ends.
“The thing that turns it up or down is not taught,” Webb said. “You go home and it’s turned all the way up to ten, and you don’t know when to turn it back down again. The regulator is not taught.”
Hoey, former director of the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Laboratory and a former DNA technical leader, connected this to the broader problem of how the field talks about stress. Forensic science, he said, has been good at defining and naming trauma — vicarious trauma, burnout, compassion fatigue — and less good at giving people tools to actually do something about it.
“We would love to use all the terms,” Hoey said, “but we would never do anything about it.”
The distinction matters because language without action can become its own barrier. Analysts who wear the vocabulary of burnout without taking steps toward it can end up confused when supervisors try to engage with them seriously. Hoey described the frustration of opening a conversation in his office, only to have the analyst deflect. “I’m stressed on one side,” he said, “but then I throw the barrier up on the other.”
Big T and little T: how trauma accumulates
The panel spent time on what Webb called the difference between big-T and little-T trauma — and why the distinction matters less than people think. A single catastrophic event is easy to identify as traumatic. But smaller stressors, accumulated over years, can reach the same weight.
“You gather up enough of them,” Webb said, “they start to feel like a big T trauma.”
She described the model as a corrosive drip: even small amounts of water, over time, will fill and eventually overflow a bucket. The question is not whether something qualifies as capital-T trauma, but how much is in the bucket — and what someone is doing to empty it.
Hoey suggested a practical response: get specific. Rather than telling a supervisor “I’m stressed,” write down what is actually happening in the body. Palms sweating. Heart rate elevated. The same physical response to different cases, written down over time, starts to produce usable information. “Now I can calibrate the two,” he said, “and I’m taking an active part in what is happening to me.”
Barriers: stigma, buzzwords, and culturally incompetent help
Three barriers came up repeatedly across the panel. The first is stigma. In a profession where analysts are expected to be objective experts, seeking mental health support can feel like a liability — something that could be surfaced in court, used to challenge credibility, or read as a sign of weakness.
The second barrier is what Dillon described as the gap between training that names stress and training that teaches people to address it. A lot of early wellness curricula, she said, leaned on war stories and catharsis: here is how hard the job is, now go back to your bench. That model has not served the field.
“Training should be solution-based,” Dillon said. “Yes, the job is tough. Here are the ways we can mitigate that stress. This is the solution.”
The third barrier, raised by Webb, is finding help that is culturally competent for people in forensic and law enforcement work. A therapist who is visibly uncomfortable with graphic case details is not a useful resource — and the analyst seeking help should not have to manage the therapist’s reactions.
“If that mental health person is not culturally competent around working with forensic folks — run,” Webb said. “That doesn’t mean that person is a bad therapist. It just means they’re bad for you.”
She compared finding the right therapist to dating: you vet them, and not every first meeting leads somewhere useful. That process takes energy, and that in itself can be a barrier.
When management is the problem
A highly upvoted question from the live audience asked about how to deal with it when leadership is the source of stress. The panel did not sidestep it.
Dillon offered the most direct answer, drawn from her own experience. The mistake she made earlier in her career was waiting until she was deep in a hole before trying to have a conversation with her supervisor. Walking into someone’s office already in crisis, with no prior relationship, and saying “you are the source of my stress” is a nearly impossible conversation to start. Building small, honest exchanges with a supervisor before a crisis — flagging stress early, describing specific responses, asking for adjustments — makes that later conversation possible.
“I have a problem, but I have some ideas for a solution,” she said. “That’s what I wish I could have done.”
Hoey pushed back on the framing of the original question. Analysts often assume management only cares about turnaround times. His suggestion: ask them. Go into the director’s office and ask what they actually care about. The conversation might be more useful than expected.
Webb returned the frame to the individual at the end. Even in the worst-case scenario — a genuinely bad boss, real structural dysfunction — the analyst’s mental health is still their own responsibility to maintain.
“Your mental health, your mental ability, is not connected to how terrible your boss is,” Webb said. “How do I take care of myself? Maybe I do have to jump through all these hoops between eight and five. But what do I do when I get home at five-thirty?”
Resilience as an equation
Hoey closed with a framework he uses in leadership work: R = C × A × P. Resilience = Connectivity X Adaptability X Purpose.
Connectivity is the relational tissue — the working relationship with a supervisor built before crisis, the colleague you can be honest with, the small conversations that make larger ones possible. Adaptability is the capacity to follow your energy, recognize when a case is too much for today, and shift without guilt. Purpose is what Powlakowski put plainly: the victim does not care who works their case. They want it worked. That clarity, for analysts who have it, is not just a motivational slogan. It is information about what they are doing and why it matters.
Dillon had started the conversation by saying that after 17 years in forensic science, she learned what it looked like when she did not take care of herself. The panel ended, more or less, in the same place: with that self-knowledge as the starting point for everything else.