The topic of clinician mental health came to us when May was Mental Health Awareness Month and we shared information on our socials about various mental health topics. This is an expansion on those posts to give more information about things of note related to mental health.
Mental Health Awareness Month is usually focused on raising awareness of different mental health disorders, the type of help available, and trying to reduce the stigma attached to mental health disorders. While this is partially aimed at educating the general public it can also be a way of encouraging people to seek out the mental health care they need.
One important group we often fail to mention in these conversations is that of the helping professionals, or mental health practitioners. Those who work in the mental health field need to be just as aware of their mental health and needs as anyone else. This allows us to do our jobs for longer and do them better. It also lets us get the most out of our profession and everyday lives. Not taking care of our mental health can lead to things like burnout and compassion fatigue. Focusing on clinician mental health can help avoid both of these concerns.
Compassion Fatigue
Burnout and compassion fatigue can look very similar. Burnout usually comes from overwork and low job satisfaction while compassion fatigue is more associated with vicarious or secondary trauma. Compassion fatigue usually comes on suddenly while burnout occurs slowly over time. When thinking about the differences in their symptoms, burnout usually involves resentment towards the job or coworkers, and can feel like wanting or needing a new job or a different job. Compassion fatigue involves self-contempt, as opposed to contempt of others and it can feel like you’re not working hard enough or doing enough to help others. It can also leave you feeling like the therapeutic relationship is uneven, with you giving much more to your work and clients than you receive in job satisfaction.
Despite these differences, they do have some overlap of symptoms. Both involve feelings of job satisfaction, bringing “work home” (an inability to stop thinking about work during off-hours), mental and physical exhaustion, headaches, trouble sleeping, poor eating habits, depression, and anxiety.
Certain clinicians are more likely to develop compassion fatigue. If you work with victims of trauma often, if your caseload is made up primarily of severely depressed clients, or if you work heavily with grief and bereavement, you’re at higher risk of developing compassion fatigue.
The first step to avoiding burnout or compassion fatigue is to be aware of how you’re feeling. Being able to notice changes in how you approach work or others can be one of the early signs that you may need to take extra care of yourself or change how you approach your professional life. If you, or others around you, notice any of those symptoms becoming a problem for you, then it’s time to step back and evaluate your work load and your self-care routine. These are important aspects of promoting clinician mental health.
Self-Care
We all know that self-care is important for many of our clients. However, it’s just as important for those who work in the mental health field. This is critically important when it comes to being able to not just do our jobs, but to do them well.
There are a lot of different things you can do to take care of yourself both before and after developing compassion fatigue or burnout:
- Consider getting therapy if this is heavily impacting your day to day; we all know how important therapy is for our clients and it can be just as important for us, too. This is especially true if you find yourself “bringing work home with you” a lot.
- Take regular days off and vacations, if possible, in order to relax and decompress from your work. While work will still be there when you get back, this can be a good way to reset yourself and give yourself more mental resources in order to tackle your caseload efficiently.
- Consider a smaller case load, if needed, or changing the types of clients you see. Sometimes it really is that we’ve reached a point where our caseload is hurting us more than we’re helping others.
- Try bringing mindfulness into your every day, such as meditation or journaling. This can also be a great way to catch the signs of compassion fatigue before it starts to impact you.
- Exercising regularly and making sure to eat a nutritious diet can also help as it’s easier to tackle the day when you’re taking care of yourself physically, too
- Make sure to get enough sleep regularly.
- Make time for things that bring you joy.
- Spend some more time in nature.
- Make sure to stay connected to your support system – compassion fatigue can sometimes make us want to isolate and this can make things worse.
- Engage in hobbies you love or find a new one – games, books, movies, gardening, anything that brings you a sense of peace or you’ve been curious about trying.
- Practice gratitude, both for the things around you and for yourself and what you bring to the world.
Prioritizing self-care can be hard, especially for the types of people who are so drawn to helping in the first place. It can be easy to feel guilty or compare ourselves to others, even more so if we have clients who are unable to engage in self-care themselves. It’s deeply important that we practice self-care, however, because this is how we can better take care of ourselves. And others, too. You need to take care of yourself before you can fully take care of others. Like we’re always told on planes, you need to put your oxygen mask on first before helping someone else put on theirs. It’s not selfish, it just ensures that we’re best able to provide that help to someone else.
Mental health care is incredibly important, not just for our clients, but for us, too. It’s especially important because we are tasked with listening to the worries of others. If we cannot keep ourselves healthy, it becomes much more difficult to do this day in and day out. Clinician mental health is something we should make sure we make time for and focus on.
Curious if you’re at risk for compassion fatigue? Take the Professional Quality of Life test developed to measure compassion fatigue AND compassion satisfaction.
Resources:
https://compassionfatigue.org/index.html
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/the-cost-of-caring-10-ways-to-prevent-compassion-fatigue-0209167
https://positivepsychology.com/self-care-therapists
https://www.samhsa.gov/blog/mental-health-awareness-month-time-self-care