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Watch for these symptoms of compassion fatigue
Feeling helpless, hopeless or powerless. Feeling irritable, angry, sad or numb. A sense of being detached or having decreased pleasure in activities. Ruminating about the suffering of others and feeling anger towards the events or people causing the suffering.
It’s not a matter of one day, you’re living your life with a great deal of energy and enjoyment, and the next, you wake up exhausted and devoid of any energy – both physical and emotional. Compassion fatigue develops over time – taking weeks, sometimes years to surface.
Compassion fatigue (CF) is stress resulting from exposure to a traumatized individual. CF has been described as the convergence of secondary traumatic stress (STS) and cumulative burnout (BO), a state of physical and mental exhaustion caused by a depleted ability to cope with one’s everyday environment.
A syndrome that includes physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion that affects an individual’s desire and ability to care for others.
Compassion fatigue is a term that describes the impact of helping others. Burnout is a term that describes the impact of a stressful workplace.
While the symptoms of Compassion Fatigue are commonly associated with “caregivers” — such as healthcare professionals, paramedics, counselors — they can occur within anyone who experiences direct or secondary exposure to traumatic events.
By identifying these early on, it will help to reduce the chances of a much more serious health condition. The signs and symptoms will act as warning signals that an individual might be at risk of experiencing compassion fatigue and should look at getting help.
The distinction that is often made between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and compassion fatigue is that the genesis of PTSD is primary trauma (Figley, 1995, p. 8), while compassion fatigue is due to secondary trauma (Cocker & Joss, 2016).
Now Allespach and other psychologists are worried that psychologists are facing increased risks of compassion fatigue as the COVID-19 pandemic stretches on. Compassion fatigue occurs when psychologists or others take on the suffering of patients who have experienced extreme stress or trauma, explains Charles R.
Irritability phase.
The person starts avoiding patient/client contact. Use of humor is strained. Lapses of concentration begin occurring. People distance themselves even further from family and friends.
Compassion fatigue can lead to burnout and its myriad symptoms. “It’s a personal tragedy, but it also leads to a failure of and breakdown in patient care, because of all the features — the exhaustion, the detachment, the cynicism — lead to a clinician who is less engaged, who is detached.
Compassion fatigue is a broad term comprising of two components – burnout and secondary traumatic stress. The symptoms of this condition are normal displays of chronic stress. In physicians these result from a strong identification with time demanding, helpless, suffering, or traumatized people.[1]
According to Brenda McCreight, therapist and author, “Parental compassion fatigue is physical, emotional and spiritual fatigue that takes over a parent and causes decline in his or her ability to experience joy at home or to feel and care for her child and herself.”
The stress of working with populations in crisis can lead to compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, vicarious traumatization, and burnout in those offering aid to victims.
Complex trauma describes both children’s exposure to multiple traumatic events—often of an invasive, interpersonal nature—and the wide-ranging, long-term effects of this exposure. These events are severe and pervasive, such as abuse or profound neglect.
Signs of Secondary Traumatic Stress
Emotional — feeling numb or detached; feeling overwhelmed or maybe even hopeless. Physical — having low energy or feeling fatigued. Behavioral — changing your routine or engaging in self-destructive coping mechanisms.
If you work in a professional setting that deals with other people’s trauma day in and day out — at a hospital, in a psychologist’s office, or at a homeless shelter, for example — you may experience a condition of extreme tiredness and desperation. This is called compassion fatigue.
When professionals’ duties to patients and their families–duties that are caught up in uncertainty and fast-paced institutional and cultural change–are made to seem irrelevant to the patients’ real needs, the resulting discomfort of professionals is generally called moral distress.
Also known as vicarious trauma, secondhand trauma, and PTSD by proxy, secondary PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) refers to the traumatic stress that can result from indirect exposure to fatal or life-threatening national events.
Background: Compassion fatigue occurs when nurses develop declining empathetic ability from repeated exposure to others’ suffering. … Nurses were predisposed to compassion fatigue by repeated exposure of others’ suffering, high stress environments, and the continuous giving of self.
In some instances, employees still report feeling burnout even after one year, and sometimes even after a decade (Cherniss, 1990). Other naturalistic studies suggest recovery takes between one and three years (Bernier, 1998).