The Making of Compassion Stress Injury: A Review of Historical and Etiological Models toward a De-Stigmatizing Neurobehavioral Conceptualization

Abstract

The complex interactions between empathy and vulnerability amongst those in helping professions/roles have been explored by practitioners and researchers across multiple disciplines for decades. While these explorations have spurred interest and awareness in the unique risks and protective factors of helping professions/roles, they have also resulted in myriad competing, overlapping, and/or parallel definitions, conceptualizations, terminology, and etiological attributions of adverse impacts of secondary exposure to others’ suffering. In this conceptual review, we will follow the historical origins of this phenomenon, beginning with the early 1900s with the First World War and the works of early psychiatric clinicians and moving toward recent advances in understanding etiology and conceptualization. Finally, we will provide support for the use and additional research of a proposed unifying and comprehensive conceptualization term: compassion stress injury (CSI), based on a mind-body and de-stigmatizing framework.