CAREGIVERS film will help to destigmatize the professional grief or secondary traumatic stress which many kinds of professional caregivers, including doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel experience. Check out the excellent article by Leeat Granek, called When Doctors Grieve, which speaks to this issue at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/when-doctors-grieve.html
Granek writes: “We recruited and interviewed 20 oncologists who varied in age, sex and ethnicity and had a wide range of experience in the field — from a year and a half in practice in the case of oncology fellows to more than 30 years in the case of senior oncologists. …
We found that oncologists struggled to manage their feelings of grief with the detachment they felt was necessary to do their job. More than half of our participants reported feelings of failure, self-doubt, sadness and powerlessness as part of their grief experience, and a third talked about feelings of guilt, loss of sleep and crying.
Our study indicated that grief in the medical context is considered shameful and unprofessional. Even though participants wrestled with feelings of grief, they hid them from others because showing emotion was considered a sign of weakness. In fact, many remarked that our interview was the first time they had been asked these questions or spoken about these emotions at all.
The impact of all this unacknowledged grief was exactly what we don’t want our doctors to experience: inattentiveness, impatience, irritability, emotional exhaustion and burnout.”
