The reason there's a modern flat Earth movement is that technology has enabled people who are grossly underqualified to answer questions about the shape of the Earth fit each other.
I'm curious to see what HN readers think of this subject, but I think it's important to realize the answers may tell us far more about HN commenters than about psychology or any objective truths about mental health. Which is to say: if the OP is asking the question because they're trying to work through their own stuff, they need to know this is no substitute for asking professionals. I expect a lot of wrong answers in the comments, and everyone else should too, and as a non-expert I'm not even sure I can recognize the wrong answers as wrong.
It's also dangerously easy to mistake professionalism with competency. There are a lot of incompetent professionals in absolutely every field and this includes mental health. Just like there are professional programmers who copy-paste code from stackoverflow, there are mental health professionals who copy-paste solutions from a favorite book or two. They don't actually have a deep understanding of what they're doing and will be hopelessly lost when someone's issues don't exactly match the examples in their books.
Now it's still probably true that the average HN commentator knows even less than the average mental health professional, but at the same time there are plenty of people on HN (including actual MDs!) who know more than the average mental health professional. Knowing how to identify these posts can be tricky, but even so I think there's value in seeking for these.
I agree completely: I had meant to imply that the "professional" bit was necessary, but not sufficient.
In therapy a wide range of topics can be explored, and more safely: when I first started therapy my motivations all had to deal with stressors in my present life, but after much discussion I ended up learning and realizing how past trauma influences how I perceive the present. I really didn't know the full set of questions I should have asked when I started, but the professional atmosphere - where I could discuss a wide range of things relatively easily (because of the professional ethics surrounding patient confidentiality) ended up making it easier and safer to explore things I shouldn't.
I think for many people who read this, if they were to go to a therapist motivated by wanting to change their response to stimuli like work stress, may eventually end up discovering how the specifics of their lives to date influence their present, and that knowledge can be empowering.
But here on HN, I don't think you'll get to meaningfully explore things like childhood, past traumas, deep fears, etc. to better understand the present. Stress is common to our (and any) profession, but the ways which we respond to it are deeply personal and transcend our industry.
I'm curious to see what HN readers think of this subject, but I think it's important to realize the answers may tell us far more about HN commenters than about psychology or any objective truths about mental health. Which is to say: if the OP is asking the question because they're trying to work through their own stuff, they need to know this is no substitute for asking professionals. I expect a lot of wrong answers in the comments, and everyone else should too, and as a non-expert I'm not even sure I can recognize the wrong answers as wrong.