Combating Compassion Fatigue Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Combating Compassion Fatigue - Essay ExampleCognitive symptoms entail apathy, disorientation, concentration with trauma, minimization, rigidity, and lowered concentration. Emotional symptoms include anxiety, anger, fear, sadness, depleted, blunted, enhanced affect, shock, depression, helplessness, numbness, guilt, and powerlessness (Portnoy, 2011). The individual may experience troubling dreams similar to those of the patient. The individual may also experience fast and involuntary recall of a frightening situation while working with the family or the patient. Concerning behavioral symptoms, the individual may be withdrawn, have poor sleep, a change in appetite, isolated, and hyper-vigilance, have nightmares, moody, and irritable. Spiritual symptoms include pervasive hopelessness, questioning of ones religious beliefs, skepticism, loss of faith, loss of purpose, and questioning of the meaning of life. embodied symptoms entail rapid heartbeat, pains and aches, impaired immune syste m, difficulty staying or falling asleep, headaches, dizziness, difficulty in breathing, and sweating (Portnoy, 2011). The Nature of the Problems and Their Causes Portnoy (2011) states that compassion fatigue is caused by empathy. Compassion fatigue is a form of burnout that appears unexpectedly and with little or no warning. The condition is generally persistent than burnout. It is the natural outcome of stress it results from helping and caring for the suffering or traumatized individuals. It entails a preoccupation with the individual or with the individuals trauma and it does not need to be at the nerve-racking occasion. The condition can result from just being exposed to an individuals painful narrative. It is further described as the convergence of primary stress, unoriginal traumatic stress, and cumulative stress in the lives of helping professionals and other care providers (Portnoy, 2011, p48). On the other hand, burnout is described as a type of mental melancholy that is manifested in normal individuals who have never suffered from prior psychopathology. The individuals experience decreased performance at work because of the negative behaviors and attitudes. The main dimensions of burnout include emotional exhaustion, olfactory property of cynicism and depersonalization, want of personal accomplishment, and sense of ineffectualness. Emotional exhaustion is the basic individual stress indicator of burnout and it refers to the feeling of being depleted and overextended of ones personal and emotional resources. The exhaustion causes the individual to distance himself cognitively and emotionally from work and it is a means devised by the individual to cope with the work overload (Coyle and Ferrell, 2010). hypostatization (detachment from job) and feeling of cynicism is the burnout interpersonal context dimension and it refers to the excessively detached response and negative callous to various features of the job. Lack of personal accomplishment a nd sense of ineffectiveness is the self-evaluation burnout dimension and it indicates the lack of productivity and achievement at work and feeling of being incompetent. Lack of personal accomplishment emerges from the lack of resources to complete the work for instance, the lack of necessary tools, lack of crucial information or even insufficient time (Coyle and Ferrell, 2010). The Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Needs Of the Caregiver When caring for patients in palliative care, the