The Price of Caring

Newsweek, March, 2007 by William Lee Adams

We know thousands of the troops returning from Iraq will need help to fend off the nightmares they've lived through there. But so, too, may many of the therapists who have experienced those traumas secondhand. A study of civilian social workers in the journal Social Work by Brian Bride, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, shows 15 percent experience posttraumatic stress disorder in their lifetimes, compared with just 7.8 percent of the general population. Forty percent of participants reported thinking about their traumatized clients repeatedly and unintentionally; 28 percent reported difficulty concentrating and 26 percent felt emotionally numb. This "secondary traumatic stress" could reduce the quality of care social workers provide and may be responsible for...

Read the full article with a Free Trial at MyWire.

Premium Content Partnership | MyWire provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.