Qualitative Interview

Social Work is a helping profession that strives to help the community on micro, mezzo, and macro levels. It is an investment of self to offer services and help to those in need. Areas of service can include, but are not limited to, traumatic situations, family situations, and child protection. As in most social service professions, the field of social work can often times take a toll on the emotional and physical stability of a social worker. One side effect from working in a helping profession is compassion fatigue. As a result, the National Association of Social Workers stresses the importance of self-care and its vitality in ensuring the social worker does not get burnt out by the profession.

Social workers deal with intense situations daily. It is important that social workers are aware of how they are affected by these interactions. Priscilla Dass-Brailsford explains in her book, that countertransference, vicarious trauma (VT), secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue and satisfaction, and burnout are all different ways that counselors can be affected (Dass-Brailsford, 2007). This is where it is important for social workers to have a plan of self-care and stress management resources to use.

As with any career, human service professionals face potential challenges that make it difficult for them to accomplish the objectives of their positions. When challenged with these obstacles, it becomes increasingly difficult for the human service professional to deliver the outstanding help and care a client needs. One such challenge is that of burnout, a reaction to the stress and strain inherent in a position that causes individuals to adopt a negative attitude about work and clients as well as become detached with the expectations of their position and its overall purpose (Woodside & McClam, 2015, p. 256). There are also physical reactions to burnout, including exhaustion, stomach issues or other illnesses, and body pain (Woodside & McClam, 2015, p. 256). This burnout can be triggered by a number of different factors, from difficulties in allocating scarce resources (Woodside & McClam, 2015, p. 249) and motivating clients to help themselves (Woodside & McClam, 2015, p. 256), to self-neglect on the part of the helper (Jackson, 2014).

Hello class, below I have posted the first few paragraphs of my essay. It is about stress issues for a DCS Caseworker.

This scholarly paper is about stress, one of the social determinants of health, and how stress occurs and how it influences the health and wellbeing of an individual. Stress affects the mental and psychological health of a person, which reflects in their thoughts and emotions, ultimately, making them think or act in a different way than normal. This abnormal behaviour could potentially lead to further severe mental damage. Stress also affects a person’s family and people near them, resulting in separation or loss of friendship, marriage and other social bonds with communities. The paper also endeavours to look into some of the strategies to overcome stress and the ways to fit into a healthy and happy life

For a moment, think of this health care providers working on a busy emergency room, call lights are blinking, an ambulance has just arrived to bring a new patient involved in a road crash some 3 miles from the hospital, an active resuscitation is going on, and 4 non-emergency patients are waiting to be attended to. One can expect the staff to be at one time be physically, mentally and emotionally drained.

The article titled “Lay representations of workplace stress: What do people really mean when they say they are stressed? by Gail Kinman and Fiona Jones, the research questions is what do people actually mean when they say they feel stress due to their jobs? and How people manage their stress? The researchers were wondering how people define the word stress due to past researches participants used to define the word stress with different meanings. For this reason, they conducted this study to find a better concept of the word stress.

These social workers also reported that heavy workloads contribute to their stress. Social workers providing mental health services had the highest percentages related to stress resulting from working with challenging clients and from being underpaid (Huxley, P., Evans, S., Gately, C., Webber, M., et al, 2005, p. 1065). Considering their experiences of insufficient time to complete day-to-day work tasks, heavy workloads, poor compensation, challenging and/or difficult clients, few resources, long work hours, and unclear job expectations, it is not surprising that social workers experience work-related stress. A genuine social worker is not only experiencing these professional stressors but as Jon’s SC exemplify, they experience secondary trauma through their clients. Under these

One reason emotional distress is an issue in social work is because social workers deal with emotional exhaustion. According to Marglin, burnout is the natural emotional exhaustion that results from spending forty or more hours per week giving to others and forgetting to take care of themselves (Marglin). Social workers give most of their time to their patients and not enough time to themselves. This causes them to lose sleep and it makes their health go down. They worry too much about the cases they have and that is also a result of emotional exhaustion, they will spend sleepless nights thinking about the children or adults they are dealing with and they think about the things that are being done. Often

In recent years, medical experts have expressed alarm about the growing problem of burnout in the human services field. Burnout is a state of being mentally, physically, or emotionally exhausted as a result of various kinds of stress. These stressors could vary but it most likely to be job related. Some of the negative symptoms of burnout include feeling drained, having a sense of failure or isolating oneself. It occurs cross culturally and can affect professionals in a variety of occupations. However, burnout is not inevitable. This paper examines the various symptoms that indicate burnout and also how to implement a plan to help avoid stress and combat burnout while working in the field of human services.

Several research studies explore the main negative consequences of stress, which is that it can affect the physical, mental, and psychological well-being of an individual (Barack-Holst et al., 2017; Lloyd et al., 2017). However, what the past research does not show is a consistent way to deal with the workplace stress as a social work professional. There are many strategies completed by

Many believe that stress is a simple problem, however it is often misunderstood and more complex than they believe (p. 181, Griffin & Moorhead, 2014). Stress is the physiological and psychological response to excessive and usually unpleasant stimulation as well as threatening events in the environment (p. 284, Schultz and Schultz, 2010). Stress appears in silent and subtle ways but this negative response affects millions of employees in all levels of all types of jobs (p. 284, Schultz and Schultz, 2010). If identified

Hirschhorn () in his case study about the consulting a community legal agency raises a number of significant issues that often emerge at the work places. He walks us through the different psychologically traumatic work situations that cause chains of anxiety and social defenses that groups utilize to avoid their tasks and fight anxiety.

One aspect of the research that proved to be particularly challenging was the generation of emotions for both the participant and the researcher during the qualitative interviews.

According to Elkin and Rosch (1990) workplace related stress in a major problem in the U.S. and it creates a major expense for corporations. Koeske, Kirk, and Koeske (1993) indicate that all jobs have some level of stress but jobs that are in the human services have additional stressors because they “derive from intense involvement in the lives of others”. (p.319). They also refer to the type of stress experienced by individuals working in human services as “burnout” (Koeske, Kirk, and Koeske, 1993, p.319). Another factor that can influence our stress level is how we handle life’s demands. There are different ways of reacting to the situations we face every day of our lives. We have all heard of expressions such as ‘road rage’ and ‘going postal’. These are terms that we have come to identified with violent reactions to stressors caused by situations all of us face every day. How many of us have experiences in the road that