On-the-job burnout is one of the biggest overlooked corporate problems of the past decade. Whilst any job can expose individuals to high levels of stress, researchers have found that for those who work with people in distress are more at risk. They also experience ‘compassion fatigue’, feeling less and less motivated and able to alleviate suffering. They build a wall between their own, and other peoples, suffering. Is this a good thing or not?
A new study aimed to answer this question by looking at empathy, burnout, and compassion fatigue in police officers who work with rape and sexual assault survivors. This is a role that requires high levels of empathy, it also leads to a kind of referred trauma onto the officer, not unlike PTSD. This can lead to compassion fatigue.
Researchers found a significant association between empathy and burnout. Officers with higher dispositional empathy actually had lower levels of burnout.
This is a great example of how one needs to differentiate between empathy and compassion. Empathy is the ability to engage with how another person is feeling, but not take on those feelings oneself. Compassion is engagement on a more active level, and often leads to transference of emotions from the sufferer to the carer. In this way, empathy can serve as a protective factor against engaging too deeply in compassion, and in turn, against burnout. The study supported this notion, and dispels previous suggestions that higher empathy leads to higher compassion fatigue or secondary trauma. Further, contrary to expectations, most officers were found to have average levels of burnout and 84 percent scored low in compassion fatigue. However, since most of the study participants had not worked longer than two years working in the special unit – time may be a determining factor in these outcomes. Longer serving officers did score higher in compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress than newer recruits.
This is a preliminary study and future longitudinal studies are needed to definitively test a correlation between empathy and burnout.
