So all librarians have to get a Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS). An MLIS is an interesting degree. The core of it is how to organize and find information really really well, including making it findable to non-experts through curation, and how to develop really good collections and programs. It also covers non-profit management, basic IT, databases, and computer stuff, basics of education and teaching, and maybe stuff like book recommendations.
Urban Librarianship, which is to say, working in a public library in a major inner-city, like Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, DC, etc. often involves very little of that, especially if you work in a branch library and thus don't get to make any of the central decisions around cataloging or purchasing (thus eliminating 2/3rds of your MLIS...)
Recently, a group called Urban Librarians Unite, which started out of librarians at the New York Public Library, organized the Urban Library Trauma Study, a very academically rigorous study of urban librarians experiences of workplace stress and violence.
By comparison, a 2013 study in Occupational Medicine found that only 10% of police officers had PTSD, 20% for firefighters, 20% for ambulance personnel, and 30% for war journalists. Urban librarians in this study self-reported a rate of 32%. This rate is even higher than the official stats on PTSD is military veterans.
My hypothesis is that the reason the disparity is so dramatic is because all of these professions are people who knew what they were getting into. They received training. People in society generally understand these to be potentially traumatic jobs. Except for librarians. Society thinks of librarians as having a peaceful quaint job focused on organizing books, and that is what we are trained to do, and it's far from our grim bloody reality.
My training for this job involved learning how to evaluate children's books for appropriate reading level and determine an individual child's reading level. It involved learning how best to categorize and organize concert posters in a database. It did involve narcan training and violence de-escalation training. But it did not train me on what urban librarians actually do. What we do is often the most extreme kinds of social work with no adequate training or resources. A non-stop parade of people in deep poverty and struggling with severe mental illness begging for help with things we just don't have the knowledge or resources to help them with; and we are expected to try our best and we sure fucking try our gd damn best and maybe some days we do have little victories but it's lot of just saying "I'm as stuck as you are, can I refer you to someone else?" and getting back "no.... don't bother... fucking bitch..." and on the worse days you have to deal with things that would require a content warning to mention. Extremely dark shit that fucking sucks. You see blood, working in public libraries, far more than you would ever expect. It's not uncommon to even witness someone dying.
This is sometimes called the "shadow mandate" of public libraries. That any gap in social services must be covered by the public library, with no appropriate increase in funding. In particular, that because governments do not employ customer service for their bureaucracies, the public library becomes the customer service department of the government, and people take out all of their frustrations with the government on public library staff. And because libraries are the only place in society you can just walk into and be indoors without any expectations of buying something or having a purpose or going through means-testing to access it, it means everyone with nowhere else to go will go to the library and every compounding systemic trauma in their life will follow them there. Public library bathrooms in some neighborhoods of philly are de facto safe-injection sites and the librarians at those branches administer narcan every day.
Ultimately, what libraries are and have and what librarians are trained to do is completely misaligned with what city governments expect from libraries while also failing to recognize that this is what libraries have been doing and what is being expected of us. What the city wants libraries to be is a network of open computer labs with on-site tech support and social workers. They don't want to give us enough funding to replace all the damaged books while also buying the new stuff, so our collections gradually shrink as we lose damaged and stolen books and buy fewer and fewer new books. They don't want to fund enough staff to actually support everyone as much as they need. They don't want to hire social workers who you can access without going through a means-testing bureaucracy just to talk to them. They don't want to give us enough money to keep our buildings from literally caving in and falling apart. They don't want to fund any social services enough to tackle any systemic issues so all the systemic issues manifest at the public library because it's the only place that's open for anyone to go to without gate-keeping.
The end-result is completely unprepared staff every day being thrown into a parade of every single systemic failure of the city and being told to fix it with no training or resources while also everyone is treating you like garbage because you are the customer service face of the city government that has failed them so massively at a systemic level. also you're not allowed to be publicly involved in politics.
It's no wonder that urban librarians have among the highest incidents of workplace PTSD of any profession in the country. It's a complete systemic failure at every single level compounding onto a few debt-saddled people and their community of also deeply traumatized mentally ill impoverished people all in the same building together and nobody in that building has anything to help them deal with it. Except books. They sure got a lot of books. Check out the 300s we can read about systemic political failures, or the 600s where the mental health books are. Maybe the 200s can offer you comfort. But oh, unfortunately, a lot of people who come to the library don't know how to read, because of systemic underfunding and failure in the public schools too.
anyway yeah i've been really burnt out and doing badly lately sorry y'all. i just wish more people understood the truth about public libraries and what actually happens in this profession. I gotta find a new therapist.