Session: Uses of Compassion Fatigue, Vicarious Trauma, and Secondary Traumatic Stress across Human Service Contexts (Society for Social Work and Research 27th Annual Conference - Social Work Science and Complex Problems: Battling Inequities + Building Solutions)

This symposium invites dialogue between scholars whose research examines how human service providers draw on the idea of compassion fatigue and related concepts like vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress (abbreviated here as CF/VT/STS) to make claims, diffuse conflict, solicit support, and work toward solutions, both for themselves and for their clients. Our aim is to put a rich body of social work research on the impacts of these overlapping constructs in conversation with their pragmatic uses by workforces in real-world contexts of practice. One line of research focuses on how human service providers conceptualize the experience and impact of routinely interacting with people affected by trauma, what Figley (1995) has succinctly referred to as the “costs of caring.� A second line of research focuses on clarifying the constructs of CF/VT/STS in order to measure the occurrence of the phenomena, identify their correlates, and ultimately reduce their negative effects. A key dimension of this line of inquiry has involved disambiguating these related terms in order to design appropriate interventions. As this body of research has developed, CF/VT/STS have increasingly entered the popular lexicon. During the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, accounts have emerged of a parallel epidemic of CF/VT/STS as health care and human service workers globally struggled to cope with increasing workloads, new risks to their own safety, new formats of service provision, and increasing exposure to illness, death, and grief. In addition to reporting what some practitioners experience and scholars aim to define and address, this symposium is motivated by the idea that CF/VT/STS is also something that human service providers use. In addition to considering the impacts of these constructs, we ask how they are actively employed by human service workers, supervisors, clients, and others, and to what effect.