Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders
3 QUESTIONS | Overcoming ‘Burnout'
Aid workers often have disturbing experiences while on assignment. MSF provides mental healthcare to staff before, during, and after they go to the field to help them prevent burnout and deal with trauma.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters and exclusion from healthcare.
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in the field people are exposed to terrible things sometimes things that are shocking for instance people rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean or people intervening after an earthquake you see a lot of dead bodies and malnutrition programs they may be seen children vomiting when we're exposed to difficult things like that you know it's normal that our heart rate goes up our breathing gets shallow but that causes those memories to become kind of more vivid and to stay with us unless we address them the psychosocial care teams like myself were always available to workers in the field iPhone by Skype and then if a specific incident happens like the team is attacked or if they're doing particularly stressful work like dealing with rape victims listening to those stories all day sometimes we'll send a team of psychologists into the field to do counseling with the local staff and the international staff people burnout can happen basically when the amount of stress that you're exposed to surpasses your coping mechanisms so we try to help people think before they go into the field how they're going to adapt what helps them distress to the field circumstances like somebody who's used to going jogging every day if they're going to be in compound in Afghanistan that they can't leave we talked about maybe bringing a jump rope and being able to exercise in a very small space bringing things now with technology movies books you can bring everything just on the tablet just to think ahead of how they're going to address that in the field but what we do know is that social connection is one of the most important ways of preventing burnout so staying connected to the team in the field but also to the people back home through phone Skype email whatever works almost all field workers have trouble readjusting when they come back for some period of time coming back to all the opulence and and plenty of this society can be jarring and it seems like people are talking about really trivial things and we've experienced all these really important things and nobody's listening and it can be really difficult we encourage people to stay connected to other field workers when they come home that can be really helpful and for couples is difficult because the field workers gone off and had all these experiences there can be a gulf so the more they stay connected while they're in the field the less that will happen but everybody knows that it's going to take time they really need time to reconnect with themselves and the people that are important to them [Music] you
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