compassion fatigue

By prioritizing your needs, you also make it more likely that when the time comes to support someone else who is struggling, you will have more emotional energy to provide and reduce the risk of compassion fatigue.

As clinics and providers in surge and blue states struggle to provide care, some of them are also struggling themselves with burn-out and compassion fatigue.

“We're sitting here trying to navigate this space and realizing that we can't stop because people need us, while navigating our own grief, wondering how much of the constant stress and compassion fatigue of this job contribute to this?”

The stories I heard from scientists, students, and animal care technicians were sometimes harrowing, but equally powerful was learning about new approaches to treat compassion fatigue, and—perhaps most importantly—to bring it out in the open in a community that has traditionally been invisible and maligned.

The idea started at an animal research conference I attended about 5 years ago, when I heard the phrase “compassion fatigue” mentioned for the first time.