by Dr. Susanne Babbel

Created on: October 25, 2009

Compassion Fatigue
Bodily Symptoms of Empathy

Medical professionals such as physicians, nurses, psychotherapists, and emergency workers, who help traumatized patients may develop their own Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms as an indirect response to their patient's suffering. This phenomenon has been referred to as compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatization or secondary traumatic stress.

A survey showed that "86.9% of emergency response personnel reported symptoms after exposure to highly distressing events with traumatized people" . . . [and] . . . "90% of new physicians, between 30 to 39 years old, say that their family life has suffered as a result of their work". When health care professionals struggle with their responses to the trauma suffered by their patients, their mental health, relationships, effectiveness at work, and their physical health can suffer.

Caregivers who reported experiencing compassion fatigue, expressed such feelings as, "I frequently dissociated and felt that I walked around in an altered state. I didn't realize that I had been in a gray space all year. That had sort of creeped in" and "It got to the point where I would feel physically sick before the appointment and feeling nauseous." Others described that they picked up their client's symptoms and explained that they had "tightness in the exact same spot" as their clients and continued to carry the sensation sometimes for days. One psychotherapist expressed, "I am the empathy lady from the old Star Trek episode and get may be 45 % hit of what my patients might be feeling 100% of."

The helpers symptoms, frequently unnoticed, may range from psychological issues such as dissociation, anger, anxiety, sleep disturbances, nightmares, to feeling powerless. However, professionals may also experience physical symptoms such as nausea, headaches, general constriction, bodily temperature changes, dizziness, fainting spells, and impaired hearing. All important warning signals for the caregiver that need to be addressed or otherwise might lead to health issues or burnout.

Researchers and authors such as Babette Rothschild, Charles Figley, Laurie Anne Pearlman and Karen Saakvitne, and B. Hudnall Stamm have recognized that medical personnel and psychologists may experience trauma symptoms similar to those of their clients. They speculate that the emotional impact of hearing traumatic stories could be transmitted through deep psychological processes within empathy. Further, Babette Rothschild

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