| Description: |
Occupational stress is widely experienced. Receiving adequate support for occupational stress is not. While a healthy recovery from occupational stress is possible, developing maladaptive coping strategies to mitigate occupational stress is common for healthcare providers. Specifically, critical care workers are uniquely positioned in that they must care for profoundly sick patients under extreme working conditions, such as high work strain, workload, and work responsibility. All of this leads to high levels of stress. These stressors, if ignored, can contribute to disordered ways of operating in the workplace, such as learned helplessness, dissociation, and self-neglect. Ideally, an individual's feelings are addressed prior to the onset of protective behavioural mechanisms, such as withdrawal or avoidance. However, early intervention requires acknowledging an individual's exposure to significant workplace stress, a practice that is not yet commonplace in Canadian hospitals. The primary goal of this research is to understand occupational stressors in critical care medicine using self-study or autoethnography. This research is qualitative and involves the use of retrospective self-observation for data collection, and thematic analysis for sorting and examining the data. I present a case for how care ethics (CE), which emphasizes the significance of relationships to ethical thinking, and trauma-informed care (TIC), which emphasizes the use of compassion towards traumatised individuals, are frameworks that better address caregiver distress than alternative models such as resilience or positive psychology. By weaving together theoretical work, empirical work, and my reflections as a health care worker, I provide evidence to answer the following research questions: (1) Do repressed, ignored, or unprocessed emotions contribute to occupational stress in critical care? (2) Does the culture of shame in contemporary medical institutions contribute to/perpetuate occupational stress? (3) Can a critical examination of ... |