Clinician Responses to Client Traumas: A Chronological Review of Constructs and Terminology.

This paper presents a chronologically-organized review of various concepts and constructs in the literature describing professional burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress reactions, as well as other related terms and constructs that have been used to describe these experiences among clinical practitioners and other social service professionals. A timeline will provide a graphic illustration of the historical relationships between the concepts under examination. This paper begins with a review of practitioner-related stress that primarily results from interaction with clients, followed by an examination of professional burnout, which is thought to result largely from environmentally-related issues. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of posttraumatic growth and compassion satisfaction.

Helping Aging Parents of Adult Children with Serious Mental Illness.

This manuscript reports the results of a study that pilot tested a home-delivered, multi-dimensional problem-solving intervention aimed at helping aging parental caregivers of adult children with schizophrenia. The results indicate that the participants (N=5) who received the 10-session intervention showed increased life satisfaction and emotional well being, and reduced feelings of burden, compared to those participants in the control group (N=10). If a planned larger scale evaluation of the intervention provides evidence of its effectiveness, practitioners could have a valuable new treatment tool to provide assistance to this caregiver population.

Caregiver mental health and potentially harmful caregiving behavior: the central role of caregiver anger.

PURPOSE: Caregivers feeling stress and experiencing mental health problems can be at risk for engaging in abusive acts against elderly care recipients. Potentially harmful behavior (PHB) was used as a measure of caregivers' engagement in, or fear of engagement in, behavior that places dependent care recipients at risk of physical and/or psychological maltreatment and may be seen as an antecedent of, or a proxy for, identifiably abusive behavior. The study examined the ability of anger to mediate and moderate the relations of depression, resentment, and anxiety with PBH. DESIGN AND METHODS: Data are from the first wave of the second Family Relationships in Late Life study of caregivers of community-dwelling elderly care recipients with whom they coreside. Caregivers (N = 417) completed face-to-face interviews. RESULTS: Anger was found to mediate the relation between anxiety and PHB. Anger both mediates and moderates the relations of both depression and resentment with PHB in a dynamic way such that the mediating effect of anger increases substantially with increased scores on both depression and resentment. IMPLICATIONS: Identifying anger levels among caregivers who report symptoms of depression is warranted. Reducing depression in caregivers who report high levels of anger may result in reductions of PHB. Screening for resentment is warranted, as the relation between resentment and anger is similar to that between depression and anger.