National Association of Social Workers

Recognizing Secondary Traumatic Stress

Vicarious Traumatization a Threat to Social Workers

Education and awareness are seen as important tools for dealing with STS.

By Lyn Stoesen, News Staff

Illustration: John Michael Yanson

Kim Shackelford, who had been working in child welfare for a number of years, was in a supervisory position when she began to have problems.

"There were a couple of really bad situations where we couldn't get the court to protect children, which was a trigger of mine," she recalled. "When I'd go home, I couldn't stop thinking about these particular children. I got really over-zealous about these particular cases. I had some nightmares."

Shackelford said her world-view began to change. "It affected me personally. I started thinking of the world as a bad place, there was a total change in the way I was thinking about people. I would get angry, there were intimacy issues with family."

She didn't have a name for it at the time, but later learned she was experiencing what is known as secondary traumatic stress (STS). When she went to work as a training unit director, she met Josephine and David Pryce, social workers who have done work on STS. "I was so happy to have a name for what had happened to me and others," she said.

Now an associate professor in the University of Mississippi's Department of Social Work, Shackelford has worked with the Pryces on STS issues and authored a book with them, Secondary Traumatic Stress and the Child Welfare Professional.

Pervasive problem. Attention to STS began in the 1980s with the work of Charles Figley, an expert in trauma who is now a professor at the Florida State University College of Social Work. Shackelford explained that Figley began examining specific behavioral symptoms related to STS and comparing them with other types of traumatic stress.

Brian Bride, an associate professor with the University of Georgia School of Social Work, said that before the early 1990s, STS had been classified under burnout or counter-transference. Figley, with whom Bride studied when earning his MSW, and others helped define STS as a distinct phenomenon and "conceptualized it as distinct from pronounced counter-transference."

Bride published an article in the January 2007 issue of the NASW journal Social Work, "Prevalence of Secondary Traumatic Stress among Social Workers," which found that STS is not limited to child welfare practitioners, but that social workers in many fields experience symptoms.

Click here for full story…> >

From June 2007 NASW News. © 2007 National Association of Social Workers. All Rights Reserved. NASW News articles may be copied for personal use, but proper notice of copyright and credit to the NASW News must appear on all copies made. This permission does not apply to reproduction for advertising, promotion, resale, or other commercial purposes.