Compassion fatigue

Compassion fatigue, also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS), is a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It is common among individuals that work directly with trauma victims such as, therapists (paid and unpaid), nurses, teachers, psychologists, police officers, paramedics, animal welfare workers, health unit coordinators and anyone who helps out others, especially family members, relatives, and other informal caregivers of patients suffering from a chronic illness. It was first diagnosed in nurses in the 1950s.

Sufferers can exhibit several symptoms including hopelessness, a decrease in experiences of pleasure, constant stress and anxiety, sleeplessness or nightmares, and a pervasive negative attitude. This can have detrimental effects on individuals, both professionally and personally, including a decrease in productivity, the inability to focus, and the development of new feelings of incompetency and self-doubt.

Journalism analysts argue that the media has caused widespread compassion fatigue in society by saturating newspapers and news shows with often decontextualized images and stories of tragedy and suffering. This has caused the public to become cynical, or become resistant to helping people who are suffering.

An early use of the term was in a 1981 US document on immigration policy. In the early 1990s the news media in the United States used the term to describe the public's lack of patience, or perhaps simply the editors' lack of patience, with "the homeless problem," which had previously been presented as an anomaly or even a "crisis" which had only existed for a short time and could presumably be solved somehow. The term was also used in 1992 when Joinson used the term in a nursing magazine to describe nurses who deal with hospital emergencies. Compassion Fatigue has been studied by the field of traumatology, where it has been called the "cost of caring" for people facing emotional pain.

Compassion fatigue has also been called "secondary victimization" (Figley, 1982), "secondary traumatic stress" (Figley, 1983, 1985, 1989; Stamm, 1995; 1997), "vicarious traumatization" (McCann and Pearlman, 1989; Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995), and "secondary survivor" (Remer and Elliott, 1988a; 1988b). Other related conditions are "rape-related family crisis" (Erickson, 1989; White & Rollins, 1981), and "proximity" effects on female partners of war veterans (Verbosky and Ryan, 1988). Compassion fatigue has been called a form of burnout in some literature. However, unlike compassion fatigue, “burnout” is related to chronic tedium in careers and the workplace, rather than exposure to specific kinds of client problems such as trauma. fMRI-rt utilized research suggests the idea of compassion without engaging in real-life trauma is not exhausting itself. According to these, when empathy was analyzed with compassion through neuroimaging, empathy showed brain region activation's where previously identified to be related to pain whereas compassion showed warped neural activation's.

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