Iris Waichler

One minute into her career as a medical social worker, Iris Waichler stood at the bedside of a young man with second and third degree burns, injured running back into a burning apartment to save his roommate. That was day one. Over 40 years later, after countless hours on a hospital burn unit and in the emergency room, she has written Burnt Out, a book built almost entirely from interviews with firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, and the families who love them. In this conversation, Iris and Arjuna dig into the real difference between burnout and trauma, and the harder-to-name wound called moral injury, the quiet erosion that happens when someone witnesses a decision that goes against their values and has nowhere to put it. They talk about how men and women first responders often carry stress differently, why families need real agreements about how much of the job comes home, and how kids sense far more than we give them credit for, even when nobody's said a word. Iris also shares o…