Professional Burnout, Vicarious Trauma, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Compassion Fatigue

By Jason M. Newell, Gordon MacNeil. Best practices in mental health, 2010

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The emotional and psychological risks associated with providing direct social work services to vulnerable populations have been largely overlooked in social work educational curriculum and agency training (Cunningham, 2004; Courtois, 2002; Shackelford, 2006). These risks should be conceptualized as occurring in two separate forms: trauma-related stress and professional burnout. Vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue are conditions related specifically to work with trauma populations, while professional burnout is considered a more general phenomenon which may occur within any social service setting. The forms of trauma-related stress conditions and professional burnout are often erroneously discussed either interchangeably or grouped together as one condition in the literature. It is best to conceptualize each of these conditions separately in order to have a comprehensive understanding of these complex phenomena. It is important that direct practitioners and educators understand the risk factors and symptoms associated with these phenomena in order to identify, prevent, and/or minimize their effects. As a best-practice initiative, it is appropriate that information on these conditions be infused into social work curricula as a first-line preventive measure for the training of inexperienced social workers who may be more vulnerable to the effects of these conditions (Lerias & Byrne, 2003). Information on these topics should also be included as part of agency training for practitioners already working in the field. This article provides a brief review of professional burnout, vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue, including the risk factors and symptoms associated with these conditions. Particular attention is paid to the inclusion of this material and the practice of self-care in both macro and micro social work education, as well as agency-training curriculum.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fc891c885c38ec9abf35b3848355029a3d9a9c8

Citations in the corpus

• Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Vicarious Traumatization: a Qualitative Review and Research Agenda (2019, unknown): “We believe that empathy-based stress is an accurate portrayal of these constructs rather than vaguely referring to the constructs as the “risks” and “hazards” of certain professions, which implies that the constructs are conditions unique to “caring” professions (Newell and MacNeil 2010).”
• Six domains of self-care: Attending to the whole person (2019, unknown): “…large caseloads, time pressure, limited professional support and supervision, professional isolation, challenging client populations, and poor job-person fit (Barnett, Baker, Elman, & Schoener, 2007; Maslach et al., 2001; Newell & MacNeil, 2010), all of which can negatively affect performance.”
• Practicing What We Teach: Trauma-Informed Educational Practice (2015, unknown): “…to ameliorate the risks associated both with engaging in trauma work and with exposure during clinical training (Courtois & Gold, 2009; Dane, 2002; Newell & MacNeil, 2010; Newell & Nelson-Gardell, Address correspondence to Janice Carello, Buffalo Center for Social Research, School of Social…”
• A Competency-Based Approach to Teaching Professional Self-Care: An Ethical Consideration for Social Work Educators (2014, unknown): “There may also be some hesitancy among students themselves out of fear that their negative reactions to clients and their situations may be viewed by field professors or supervisors as a weakness or limitation in their ability to practice (Newell & MacNeil, 2010).”