Lying Down in the Ever-Falling Snow

Canadian Health Professionals’ Experience of Compassion Fatigue

Wendy Austin, E. Sharon Brintnell, Erika Goble, Leon Kagan, Linda Kreitzer, Denise Larsen, Brendan Leier

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781554588886
• eBook ISBN: 9781554588893
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Nursing
• Index: Social Sciences

Compassion fatigue from the perspective of insiders in caregiving roles

First used to describe the weariness the public felt toward media portrayals of societal crises, the term compassion fatigue has been taken up by health professionals to name—along with burnout, vicarious traumatization, compassion stress, and secondary traumatic stress—the condition of caregivers who become "too tired to care." Compassion, long seen as the foundation of ethical caring, is increasingly understood as a threat to the well-being of those who offer it.

Through the lens of hermeneutic phenomenology, the authors present an insider's perspective on compassion fatigue, its effects on the body, on the experience of time and space, and on personal and professional relationships. Accounts of health professionals, alongside examinations of poetry, images, movies, and literature, are used to explore the notions of compassion, hope, and hopelessness as they inform the meaning of caring work. The authors frame their exposé of compassion fatigue with the very Canadian metaphor of "lying down in the snow." If suffering is imagined as ever-falling snow, then the need for training and resources for safe journeying in "winter country" becomes apparent. Recognizing the phenomenon of compassion fatigue reveals the role that health services education and the moral habitability of our healthcare environments play in supporting professionals' ability to act compassionately and to endure.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• The Question of Compassion Fatigue: An Introduction
• What Is Compassion?
• Differing Understandings of Compassion Fatigue
• A New Way of Understanding Compassion Fatigue
• The Cold Heart: The Bodily Experience of Compassion Fatigue
• The Endless Winter: The Temporal Experience of Compassion Fatigue
• Lost and Alone in a Prairie Blizzard: The Experience of Space in Compassion Fatigue
• An Icy Wall (Within and Between): Relations and Compassion Fatigue
• Bundling Up: Finding Hope in Cold Climes
• Survival in Winter Country
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index