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Social Work Of A Therapist Essay

2137 Words9 Pages

Psychotherapists are important for people who are suffering from mental health issues. They are the people who are able to help other people, mostly by just talking to them and helping them through any issues that they may be having. However, they suffer from many of the same issues that their patients do. In a study of 800 psychologists, it was found that most had been in therapy before and of those, about sixty-one percent had felt some sort of clinical depression; about one in four have felt suicidal and that nearly four percent had said that they have attempted suicide (Kleespies, Van Order, Bongar, Bridgeman, Bufka, Galper, Hillbrand & Yufit, 2011, p. 244). There are too many people that they would be able to help if they got the …show more content…

Social workers who work with suicidal clients are also at risk, just like therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Social workers that suffer the after-effects of a patient’s suicide suffer from many feelings that include incompetence, failure, shame and self-guilt like others of their field (Ting, 2011, p. 327). Another way that keep a healthy life and be a better therapist is to be able to identify if they are going through the symptoms of burnout. If a therapist is suffering from burnout, they will not be able to do their job effectively. Some of the symptoms that have been associated with burnout are emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of personal accomplishment (Malinowski, 2013, p. 117). Emotional exhaustion not only affects their jobs, but it can affect their personal lives as well. Therapists who suffer from this condition may not only feel emotionally exhausted, they may also feel some physical tiredness as well. Another of these possible symptoms is depersonalization. Depersonalization happens when a person goes through actions but does not show any signs that they are in control of what they are doing. A person suffering from this symptom may have feelings that the world is vague or does not have meaning or lacks significance. This can be harmful if a psychotherapist feels this way, as it could give their client the impression that they are not valuable and it could exacerbate the condition the patient originally came in for. It can also have the unwanted concern of potentially doing damage to the therapist’s practice. If it seems as though the therapist does not care, patients will no longer feel that they will be able to see that therapist as they seem to not care and it will force the patient to find another therapist. There can also be problems with the home life as well, as it puts a

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