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Angela Fazio, Jod Taywaditep, Ph.D., Justyna Kapustka, Isabel Arias, Pretty Rami, Mike Keaveny, Christopher Corsale, and Vanessa Bourgeois
The In Touch Hotline
The University of Illinois at Chicago
Counseling Center
Chicago, IL
The presentation by the volunteers at the InTouch Crisis Hotline at the University of Illinois at Chicago will survey burnout, always a relevant topic for crisis workers. Among the sub-topics that will be addressed are the different terms often used interchangeably with burnout, such as compassion fatigue or secondary traumatic stress (STS). Discussion of these terms will include differentiation of their symptoms and causes, as well as identification and analysis of factors and job-specific stressors that leave paraprofessionals, crisis counselors, and other crisis responders such as police officers, firefighters, and emergency room nurses and doctors vulnerable to each phenomenon. The presentation will also address treatment and prevention of burnout and compassion fatigue, with a focus on the consistency between suggested effective methods in compassion fatigue literature and actual programs utilized by various agencies and institutions. We will discuss the most effective ways of combating compassion fatigue at a personal and institutional level. We will also address problems with the ways in which treatment and prevention techniques are often presented, e.g. vague and subjective exhortations like "be intuitive," or specific sets of advice that could potentially skew towards only one gender (light scented candles, take a bubble bath). The presentation will be grounded both in surveys of the available research, and in the testimonials of crisis workers in a variety of fields, from suicide and rape crisis hotlines to law enforcement and firefighting.
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