Compassion fatigue is a term that describes the physical, emotional and psychological impact of helping others, often through experiences of stress or trauma. I never knew the reality of this concept until I was sitting on the other side of my therapist’s office explaining to her that my work felt like it was drowning me.
In September 2022, I became a mental health assistant at the psychiatric hospital that serves Leon and the surrounding seven counties. I was hired to work in our inpatient services. Inpatient services at a psychiatric hospital in Florida typically mean working with all kinds of Baker Acts and keeping these individuals safe from themselves and each other. The things I see daily are not something that a typical person experiences when going to and from their day job. I have to remember that these individuals are in crisis and their experiences inside this hospital are not going to be rainbows and butterflies. I have had extensive hands-on training for when a client is going through a rough time, and it is necessary to intervene. On most days, it is not out of the ordinary for me to have to use this hands-on training with a client.
I have a love for all of the clients that come through the hospital, even the ones that verbally abuse the staff members and make us question why we started this career in the first place. I think about my clients through every aspect of my life, not just work. In a normal job, one can just clock out and go home. In a job like this, I am never truly clocked out. I just stop getting paid.
I started this job with the pure and genuine intentions to help an adult or a child that may be going through a rough spot in their life because I’ve once been in their shoes. What I’ve found is that I’ve lost compassion as time went on and started to become desensitized to normal human emotion. Things that should make a person sad didn’t have an effect on me because I see them on the daily. It wasn’t out of the norm to see an adult almost lose their life to mental illness or a child get abandoned by their parents and wind up on the unit. And while this is the job I signed up for, it quickly became too much to handle.
Working in a psychiatric hospital, it is easy to get detached from reality and adopt a pessimistic view of the world. The things I see and hear behind those barred doors will stay with me for a long time. It’s not easy to see so much suffering and just move on with my life like nothing has happened. In this alternate reality where chairs are bolted to the floor, shoelaces are confiscated, fobs and keys are needed just to get through one door and four-point restraints are a room away, I can officially admit that these things change a person. It was only after a realization that sitting in my car after a 12-hour shift to cry until my chest hurt wasn’t normal, that I decided to lessen my hours.
As a pre-nursing student, I was looking for a way to gain experience in the healthcare field while simultaneously doing something to better the community. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all mold for somebody to do this job, because the technicians come from all different backgrounds. However, I have realized that it just wasn’t meant for me. I feel others’ pain too deeply and have worked too tirelessly to get myself in a good mental place just to give it all away.
If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, self-harm or feel you are a danger to yourself and others, please do not hesitate to get help. You are never alone.
Suicide Hotline Number: 988
https://988lifeline.org/
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