Multiple terrorist attacks: Compassion fatigue in Israeli social workers.

Abstract

With each recurrent terror attack in Israel, hospital social workers attend family members of the injured and the dead from the very first hours after the incident, giving them psychological first aid and information. The aims of the study were to assess the occurrence and levels of compassion fatigue and its correlates among hospital social workers. Fifty-three social workers from two major hospitals in Israel filled out the Secondary Traumatization and Burnout subscales of the Compassion Fatigue Questionnaire, in addition to demographic details, professional experience, and participation in supervision or debriefing sessions. The results show that social workers had participated on average in 4.4 (SD 2.6) terror attacks. Of the social workers, 75.5% had participated in debriefing sessions soon after the terror incident, and most had participated in individual or group supervision. They reported moderate levels of secondary traumatization and low levels of burnout. The latter outcome was related to participation in group supervision during the previous year. Secondary traumatization was not associated with the number of terror attacks, nor with demographic characteristics or professional degree or seniority, nor with having individual or group supervision or participation in debriefing. Despite the high number of terror events they attended, participants in the study proved relatively resilient to their effects. Compassion fatigue emerged as a state independent of a range of personal and situational characteristics.

Intervention in a Shared Traumatic Reality: A New Challenge for Social Workers

“…Eidelson et al (2003) reported that following 9/11, psychologists described feelings of loss, fear, pain and grief. Similar feelings of distress were related by Israeli social workers during times of terror (Cohen et al, 2006)-feelings that included pain, sorrow, fear, threat, uncertainty and sometimes even helplessness. Similar emotional distress was also reported by Shamai and Ron (2009).…”

“…Most of the helping professionals after 9/11 reported feelings of helplessness due to the challenges posed by the large numbers of people trying to cope with intense pain (Eidelson et al, 2003). Helplessness has also been mentioned by professionals working with victims of terror in Israel, due to their limited ability to help their clients cope with the magnitude of their suffering (Cohen et al, 2006;Lev-Wiesel et al, 2008). Some professionals also report feelings of helplessness due to their sense of being in physical danger while lacking any means of protecting themselves (Shamai, 2005).…”

“…Coping with task overload-an ongoing source of stress-and containing the horrifying contents of the clients' experiences are handled more easily when the social worker has support from colleagues and professional organisations. Working in co-worker teams, for example, when treating terror victims was found to alleviate social workers' distress (Cohen et al, 2006). Further evidence supporting this idea comes from Seeley (2003), who found that professionals who had no one (neither peers nor colleagues) with whom they could discuss their work reported high levels of emotional distress.…”

A Predictive Research on the Posttraumatic Improvement of Emergency Health Employees

“…This means that similar traumatic events were experienced in their previous experiences or professionally encountered incidents. Cohen, Gagin, and Peled-Avram (2006) reported in their study that 48.2% of social workers had a high rate of secondary traumatic stress symptoms. In this case, traumatic events can be claimed to trigger secondary traumatic stress symptoms, which leads to another social trauma (Maercker & Herrle, 2003) and difficult to prevent stresses.…”

Therapeutic Intervention in a Continuous Shared Traumatic Reality: An Example from the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

“…The emergency phase, which necessitates changes in the mental health professionals' roles and obligations (Dekel and Baum, 2010;Tosone et al, 2003) as well as the physical settings in which their work takes place, also requires an immediate implementation of flexibility and creativity on the workers' part. For some, the abrupt changes in the settings and roles are distressing (Lev-Wiesel et al, 2009) and they may report high levels of helplessness attributable to the scope of the disaster (Eidelson et al, 2003), the pain and suffering endured by the victims (Cohen et al, 2006) and the social workers' own sense of exposure to danger while in the midst of offering mental health assistance (Shamai, 2005).…”