Well-being Is No Longer Optional.

• Author: Pabst, Kirsten

Our profession must implement structural changes now to account for secondary trauma, promote organizational health and ensure employee resilience.

I was out of law school only a few months, just into my role of prosecuting misdemeanors and traffic offenses, before being called-out to my first crime scene in the middle of the night. The suspect had slashed the victims neck and fled on foot, leaving the victim bleeding out on the dirty floor of the old trailer, amidst garbage, half-finished crosswords and animal waste. By the time I got there, the victim had been taken to the hospital and detectives were already processing the scene--taking photos, gathering evidence and swabbing for forensics. As I stared at the coagulating pools, I was struck by two things that have stayed with me for the last 25 years: my awe of the human body's capacity to hold and lose so much fluid, and that smell--the distinct mixture of blood, alcohol and squalor.

In the decades to follow, there were countless more crime scenes, gruesome photographs, horrific stories and jury trials. On the way to my kids' grade school, I look left and think about the college student who was strangled in the ground-level apartment and then dumped on Blue Mountain Road. The slant streets area conjures images of a schoolteacher who was bludgeoned with an iron on an Easter Sunday decades before. Before long, my physical and internal landscapes, like most prosecutors who handle crimes of violence, were dotted with bloody icons of human tragedy and suffering.

PROSECUTORS ARE EXPOSED TO AND SUSCEPTIBLE TO SECONDARY TRAUMA STRESS

Career prosecutors who handle crimes of violence and human tragedy will often say that the most effective prosecutors are those who deeply connect with people and authentically convey to jurors the elusive essence of human tragedy. Serving as front-line warriors fighting for justice on behalf of those who have experienced tragedy at the hands of another is noble and necessary work but is often not sustainable--at least the way we've been doing it. It is no surprise that prosecutors often display classic symptoms of long-term exposure to secondary trauma, which can mirror the symptoms of PTSD. Many once exuberant ADAs pivot from, "This is God's work--I don't do it for the money," to "You can't pay me enough," as they pack their diplomas for a lucrative practice in a law firm with less rewarding work, lots more money, and very little gore.

For those that stick it out, the rewards of a career in prosecution are great but the cost can be very high. In my 25 years, I've lost colleagues to suicide, heart disease, and addiction and seen others gradually go from young, vibrant, enthusiastic public servants to barely recognizable, burnt-out, cynical, and badly degraded copies of their former selves.

As a professional community, we recently started discussing the need to address secondary trauma stress [STS] in frontline professionals who work with victims of abuse. And we just now started embracing the idea of holistic well-being in the field of criminal prosecution, a profession saturated with violence and trauma. Professor Rachel Naomi Remen, Osher Center of Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said, "The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet." (1)

It is time to turn the crystal and see our profession both as it is--survivable--and as it can be--thrivable. (2) Well-being is no longer optional. We must pivot and implement structural changes which account for prosecutors' unique challenges, promote organizational health and prevent our mentees from flaming out.

THE EFFECTS OF SECONDARY TRAUMA STRESS ARE CUMULATIVE

As a profession, we've been catching up on studying primary trauma as we begin to understand the profound effects of traumatic experiences on the human brain. We are learning that when a person or child suffers ongoing or intense abuse, the experience actually changes the physiological structure of the brain and ushers in psychological effects that change the persons view of and response to stress, to others and to the world. Trauma affects the brain's ability to process information, recall events and communicate to others. (3)

Similarly, indirect...