Self-Care: Create your own calm

“Self-Care is not selfish. You cannot serve from an empty vessel.”

Over the course of their training, psychologists have often been told to maintain objectivity in their work. They are supposed to suspend their personal beliefs and feelings and look at clients with clear glasses. However, psychologists cannot discard empathy and compassion for they are the tools that help them connect with clients. Without these two, a psychologist is rendered as a mere robotic device that hears their clients, but does not listen.

However, the act of being compassionate and empathetic comes with a hidden cost, especially for clinical psychologists as they traditionally see clients with more complex issues. Compassion fatigue and emotional burnouts are prevalent in increasing rates amongst helping professionals. Compassion fatigue is a psychologist’s reduced capacity to feel empathy, positive regard, or authenticity for their clients and is usually “the natural consequent behaviours and emotions resulting from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced or suffered by a person” (Figley, 1995, p. 7, as cited in Adams, Boscarino, & Figley, 2006). Psychologists use compassion to increase the effectiveness of their therapy. Unfortunately, feeling compassion for clients also puts psychologists at the risk of compassion fatigue. It becomes a serious issue as it decreases psychologists’ competence in helping their clients. The APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists states that “psychologists strive to be aware of the possible effect of their own physical and mental health on their ability to help those with whom they work.” This means that a psychologist shouldn’t practice when they find themselves experiencing compassion fatigue as it affects their ability to foster the well-being of their clients.

Experiencing compassion fatigue for a longer duration can lead to an emotional burnout. It is characterized by emotional and physical exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). When psychologists do not release their emotions regarding their work, the resulting emotional exhaustion provides the perfect breeding ground for emotional burnouts. All mental health practitioners experiencing burnout disengage from work, which consequently leads to decreased competence. Both compassionate fatigue and emotional burnouts can create feelings of depression, anxiety, and helplessness amongst therapists. Ironically then, the therapist herself/himself becomes the client.

All helping professionals like nurses, emergency room personnel, police, and mental health providers are equally at risk for becoming victims of both compassion fatigue and emotional burnouts. However, clinical psychologists who tend to survivors of trauma are at a unique risk of experiencing vicarious trauma. Vicarious trauma occurs when psychologists develop trauma reactions after being exposed to their client’s traumatic experience (Trippany, Kress, & Wilcoxon, 2004). Psychologists start exhibiting symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder such as experiencing intrusive thoughts and images of their client’s stories along with physiological arousal and somatic complaints. Researchers working in the field of trauma are also not safe from vicarious trauma (Bell, Kulkarni, & Dalton, 2013). All psychologists are vulnerable to compassion fatigue, emotional burnouts, and perhaps, vicarious trauma. The only thing that can buffer the effect of this debilitating kryptonite is self-care. This includes all behaviours and actions taken to increase mental and physical resilience and well-being. Self-care acts as a safeguard against psychological distress caused over the course of a psychologist’s career; it recharges the therapist and helps them cultivate optimism.

Thus, self-care helps a therapist navigate around these pitfalls of compassion fatigue and emotional burnout. The next blog in this series will include various kinds of self-care techniques as well as some common things that get in way of it.

Prachi Bhuptani

Demystifying Research for the Indian Psychologist

Besides being engaged with clients or students, some psychologists might undertake research, not just as an alternative to lazy weekends, but to earn a decent living. In fact, most psychologists are meant to practice, teach, and research, in some combination or the other.  These three distinct (yet interconnected) roles require different sets of skills, and graduate and post-graduate training is usually targeted to develop such skill sets. Psychologists who practise can also conduct research with clinical samples, similar to researchers who conduct studies with their students. As an undergraduate student of psychology you may well be tired of being asked to read people’s minds, but you also should have taken part in a professor’s research project.

However, most Indian students of psychology have hardly had this opportunity, and that is a cause for great concern. As a result, most undergraduate (and in some cases, postgraduate) students hardly have any understanding of research in psychology and research methodology.

So how do undergraduate students grasp what research is? One way is through the arduous Lab sessions that are a mandatory part of the curriculum for psychology majors. And another way is… Um… Yes! When they’re required to complete a Research Methods course as part of post-graduate study. And then, training in research is complete (?). At least as complete as it could be to receive a passing grade, anyway.

Given such limited exposure to the rigors of scientific research in psychology even at the postgraduate level, chances are the student will often be dissuaded from doing/participating/assisting in research for the rest of their careers. Unless of course, the resilient few go on to complete an MPhil or a PhD (and I completely empathize with you!). Yet, an additional degree often does not guarantee adequate training in research, because the quality of training vastly differs from one University to the next. No, this isn’t the difference between one institute teaching Path Analysis and the other not; this is the difference between being exposed to a flourishing research environment, with innovative principal investigators, and enthusiastic participants, and an ethics committee that distinguishes right from wrong, and co-investigators who cooperate more than compete, and… basically, a culture for research.

This is a utopian view, where systems and processes are stable, and the profession of a social science researcher commands respect. But reality  tends to be a bitter pill. The notions of research and the profession of a researcher are often misconstrued, misperceived, and misunderstood, not just in a discipline like psychology, but in the sciences as whole (which, by the way, include social sciences). Scientific illiteracy can contribute to such a state of affairs, where individuals may not only be ill-informed about how to think analytically and interpret scientific conclusions presented in popular media, but may also be ill-informed about what the components of science and research really are. Although critics of this opinion may throw Indian literacy figures in the air, I oppose the criticism by stating that most individuals who have the fortune of receiving higher education are literate, but are often scientifically illiterate. And this lack of information, combined with poor monetary incentives to continue researching, significantly contributes to students being dissuaded from entering research.

So now, I’ll break down some myths of research in India that I’ve come across.

Yes, research is fun, if you make it so.

No, natural science research and social science research are not at par; the former often receives more funding (often for completely valid reasons, too).

Yes, research requires resilience, commitment, and internal motivation (in more than equal proportions).

No, the monetary payoffs aren’t great; but the feeling of contributing to knowledge more than makes up for it.

Yes, if you’re good at it, you’ll go places, get published, and the whole deal.

Yes, you’ll receive credit for your work, most of the time.

No, you won’t receive funding for all your ideas.

Yes, research is creative! Scientific creativity is prized above all else.

Yes, you can choose any topic under the sun that can be plausibly studied about, in a scientific manner.

No, you won’t be able to plagiarize; integrity is one of the corner stones of academic research.

Yes, seeing your name in print in an article that you’ve toiled over for months on end really makes it worthwhile.

No, it isn’t easy.

It’s a tough road ahead for social science researchers here, and I admit, it isn’t all roses and peaches. But I’d urge students of psychology, and other social science disciplines to give the profession a chance. After all, dismissing something without knowing what it is, is a marker of scientific illiteracy. In the spirit of the indomitable Mr. Spock (and Leonard Nimoy): “Live long and prosper!” and research!

 Hansika Kapoor