Compassion Fatigue
INTROUCTION
Compassion Fatigue refers to the potential emotional, spiritual and physical exhaustion experienced by the helping professionals out of repeated exposure to the client's emotional pain. Compassion Fatigue is capable of impacting professional or personal life of a caregiver with symptoms like difficulty in concentrating, emotional distancing or numbness, intrusive imagery, irritability, exhaustion as well as loss of hope. It has even been termed as "the cost of caring" because it can easily affect professionals in any field who happen to come in contact with persons who have been affected by emotional pain or trauma (Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project, 2012). Counselors experiencing compassion fatigue are capable of noticing that they are not emotionally available to themselves or to other important people in their lives.
Described as acknowledgement of another's suffering, compassion tends to be accompanied by expression of a desire of easing or ending the suffering, it forms an important characteristic that is always identified in the healthcare workers as well as nurses. Within the job shift of nurses, anything can happen that may make it change from administering medication to performing life saving measures or might be holding the hands of a patient who is at a critical condition. Within these few hours emotions are capable of flooding the soul that make one drained and exhausted, ( Hooper, C., et al., 2010). This will definitely bring coaster of emotions to any person. This is why health care workers tend to be prone to emotional and physical fatigue.
Compassion fatigue which is also known as secondary traumatic stress, vicarious traumatic, secondary stress reaction and second hand shock has different warning signs shown by different concepts of compassion fatigue.
Impaired ability to make judgment
It is a symptom that is capable of making a caregiver to go to a halt mentally. The caregivers feel incompetent professionally and begin doubting their clinical skills as well as ability to help others (Adams, et.al., 2006). If it turns to be more severe one can find himself or herself in the middle...
A section of them tend to describe while feeling highly desensitized or numb to what may be consider to be of minor issues out of their clients lives, (Lesley Radocy, 2010). For example when a doctor lets his or her child to walk having a broken leg for more than one day before taking the child to the hospital because the doctor may have missed the symptoms and just look at it as a small sprain. In some occasions reduced ability of feeling empathy takes place when one is working a highly homogeneous client population. There are risks involved when one has reduced empathy and jumping ahead or filling in the blank, this may make the caregiver miss crucial information from them.
Physical signs of compassion fatigue
This can be in form of feeling exhausted on starting your day, can be in form of even dragging feet and returning to work after the weekend yet one is still feeling drained physically. One may be feeling headaches, insomnia as well as increased susceptibility to illness.
In some instances it can be in form of somatization and hypochondria. Somatization is where emotional stress is translated to physical symptoms. This can be in form of frequent stress-induced migraines, tension headaches, stress-induced nausea, gastro-intestinal symptoms as well as unexplained fainting spells. Even though the ailments tend to be real their main causes are majorly related to emotions and stress.
On the other hand hypochondrias tend to be having hypervigilance and anxiety over a potential physical ailments that one may have or his loved one may have. In its severe form, hypochondria are capable of becoming a debilitating anxiety disorder. This is majorly on the individuals whose work is majorly on healthcare, (Mary King, 2011). For example in any case an individual is in cancer care, especially at the diagnostic end, this individual may find himself being over worried about any bruise and bump that are on him or on whoever he is…
