Social Work Now, Issue 32, pages 28-32.
There has been increasing attention over the past several years to the effects on staff of working in emergency situations, with traumatised clients or with very stressful distressing material. Secondary traumatic stress (STS), sometimes called vicarious traumatisation (McCann and Pearlmann, 1990), can be defined as the impact on a worker of repeated exposure to traumatic client material (Steed and Downing, 1998), or the stress reaction that comes from assisting or wanting to assist a traumatised person (Beaton and Murphy, 1995). In research literature a variety of terms may be used interchangeably: traumatic countertransference (Danieli, 1980), compassion fatigue or secondary traumatic stress disorder (Munroe, Shay, Fisher, Makary, Rapperport and Zimering, 1995).