The term ‘compassion fatigue’ is often applied as the personal cost of caring, but new research from the University of Auckland suggests the phenomenon could in fact be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Professor Nathan Consedine, a health psychologist in the School of Medicine, said his group’s research raises questions about the idea that compassion is inherently exhausting; in fact, he argues that it can have a protective effect against burnout.
“Burnout in the health system is real, no doubt about it. But the experience of being too fried to care for other people is bundled up with the idea of compassion fatigue,” he said.
The notion of compassion fatigue has its basis in the work of author Carla Joinson in the early 1990s, which suggested emergency nurses experienced a particular type of burnout where they had exhausted their ability to nurture, said Prof Consedine. “The idea is that compassion is like a muscle or an energy reserve that gets depleted over time. However, if it were a reservoir, you would expect compassion fatigue to get worse over time, but it does not.”
More experienced practitioners, people who have been doing it 10, 15, 20 years, report lower levels of compassion fatigue, he said. “So, according to the theory, either they have found a way to give compassion without draining the reservoir, or they have found a way to fill up the reservoir. But my interpretation is there is no reservoir and it is not inherently fatiguing to care for other people.
