- Bottled up emotions - emotional outbursts
- Rescues the needy
- Isolation
- Sadness
- Apathy
- Depression
- Jumpy, startles easily
- Complains often to coworkers and management
- Lack of self care
- Recurring nightmares and/or flashbacks
- Persistent ailments
- Difficulty concentrating
- Accident prone
Compassion fatigue (CF) is not a disease.
CF is a normal consequence of working in a caring and helping profession that deals with traumatized patients and clients.
- Secondary traumatization
- Secondary victimization
- Soul pain
- Vicarious trauma
- Wounded healer
- Vicarious traumatization
Secondary traumatic stress - sometimes distinguished as trauma associated with directly working on traumatized, sick, and dying patients.
Symptoms and Signs of CF*
For our purposes we will consider CF to be a comprehensive term encompassing the concepts of secondary trauma, secondary traumatic stress, vicarious traumatization, and adding the components of cumulative stress, intrusion, avoidance, and hypervigilance.
- Borrowed stress
- Compulsive sensitivity
- Disabled resiliency
- Emotional contagion
- Empathic distress
- Empathic strain
- Empathy fatigue
- Empathy overload
- Existential suffering
- Fatal availability
- Indirect trauma
Compassion fatigue – CF – Descriptors and synonyms*
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