HEALING EMERGENCY WORKERS' PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE.

• Author: HAYES, ROBERT E.

The stress on mental health professionals and volunteers involved with catastrophic disasters can linger long after those events have faded from the public's mind.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I was puzzled by the remark of a client at the close of a therapy session in which she had dealt with an intensely traumatic event. "You're awfully brave," she said. After I wondered about the meaning of this statement for two weeks, the client was asked to clarify it in the next session. In stating that "You have to listen to all of this," she displayed amazing insight into the work of the professional helper. A mental health professional can be affected by what is heard in the therapy session or experienced in crisis and disaster efforts.

Mental health professionals--counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, psychiatric nurses, etc.--risk the possibility of becoming traumatized themselves as they treat the traumas of their clients. The vicarious experiencing of what is heard from clients can affect counselors as if the events were happening to them personally. Psychiatrists have been found to have the highest suicide rate of the medical specialties. Mental health workers are well-advised to recognize and treat their own stress as they do that of their clients.

The harmful effects of emotional stress have been recognized in war veterans. From "shell shock" in World War I to "battle fatigue" in World War II to "post traumatic stress disorder" in the Vietnam War, mental health professionals have been presented with the challenge of helping veterans deal with the horrors they met in battle. If the memories of such experiences are not recalled and processed, those individuals may suffer from the related stress for years. As the veterans of World War II appeared on television in news coverage of the 50th anniversary of the end of that war, a great number of them cried. Many had not talked about their experiences with anyone else in all that time.

More recently, attention has been given to the stress present in the jobs of emergency workers in the civilian arena. An organization, the International Critical Stress Foundation, has been founded to assist in the reduction of job stress of police, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and employees in emergency dispatch centers. Job stressors in these occupations have been associated with substance abuse, divorce, suicide, and family violence.

One of the primary interventions of critical...