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When cases of COVID-19 began to surge in New York City in March 2020, Carol A. Bernstein, MD, did her best to practice psychiatry and carry out administrative tasks from a home office, but by mid-May, she became stir-crazy.
“I just couldn’t stand it, anymore,” Bernstein said during an annual psychopharmacology update held by the Nevada Psychiatric Association. “I came back to work at least just to see my colleagues, because I felt so disconnected. Normally, in a disaster, people come together – whether it’s responding to an earthquake or a fire or whatever. People come together to provide themselves with support. They hug each other and hold each other’s hands. We could not and cannot do that in this pandemic.”
According to Bernstein, stress, fear, and uncertainty triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic require special attention to the needs of health care personnel.
“Taking care of yourself and encouraging others to do the same sustains the ability to care for those in need,” said Bernstein, who is vice chair for faculty development and well-being in the departments of psychiatry and behavioral science and obstetrics and gynecology at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. “This includes both meeting practical needs as well as physical and emotional self-care. Everyone is impacted by this, so emotional support needs to be available to everyone. In the psychiatric community, we have triple challenges. We have to take care of our patients, our colleagues, and ourselves. It’s a lot.”
Specific challenges for health care workers include the potential for a surge in care demand and uncertainty about future outbreaks.
“Although we don’t have [personal protective] and respirator shortages at the moment, we’re worried about the vaccine shortages,” she said. Then there’s the fact that patients with comorbid conditions have the highest risk of death and the task of providing supportive care as well as medical care. “Of course, we still have a risk of becoming infected or infecting our families. There is additional psychological stress: fear, grief, frustration, guilt, insomnia, and exhaustion.”
Now, more than a year removed from the start of the pandemic, health care personnel are experiencing compassion fatigue, which she described as the inability to feel compassion for our patients because of our inability to feel compassion for ourselves. “We’re certainly experiencing burnout, although the primary aspect of burnout that we are experiencing is emotional exhaustion,” said Bernstein, who also is a past president of the American Psychiatric Association.
General risk factors for burnout and distress include sleep deprivation, high levels of work/life conflict, work interrupted by personal concerns, high levels of anger, loneliness, or anxiety, the stress of work relationships/work outcomes, anxiety about competency, difficulty “unplugging” after work, and regular use of alcohol and other drugs. At the same time, she continued, signs of burnout and secondary traumatic stress include sadness, depression, or apathy; feeling easily frustrated; feeling isolated and disconnected from others; excessive worry or fear about something bad happening; feeling like a failure, and feeling tired, exhausted, or overwhelmed.
“Why is this crisis so hard for us docs?” she asked. “Because focusing on ourselves – with worries like ‘are we okay? Are we going to get sick?’ – compromises our focus on patients. This can lead to medical errors and unprofessional behavior. There are significant feelings of guilt that ‘I’m not doing enough.’
“This was true for a lot of us in psychiatry who were working virtually early during the pandemic while our medicine colleagues were on the front lines exposing themselves to COVID. Even the people working on the COVID units at the height on the initial surge felt guilty because treatment algorithms were changing almost every day. Fortunately, protocols are more established now, but the sense of not doing enough is pervasive and makes it difficult for us to ask for help.”
Fear of the unknown also posed a challenge to the workforce. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with at first,” she said. “The loss of control and autonomy, which is a major driver of burnout in the best of circumstances, was particularly true here in New York. People were told what to do. They were deployed into new circumstances. We experienced a significant loss of control, both of the virus and of what we were doing, and a widespread sense of isolation and loneliness.”
To cultivate resilience going forward, Bernstein advocates for the concept of psychological flexibility, which she defined as the ability to stay in contact with the present moment regardless of unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, while choosing one’s behaviors based on the situation and personal values. “It is understanding that you can feel demoralized and bad one minute and better the next day,” she said. “This is a key concept for being able to continuously adapt under stressful circumstances and to tolerate uncertainty.”
She advises clinicians to identify safe areas and behaviors, and to maximize their ability to care for themselves and their families – including keeping in touch with colleagues and people you care about. “You also want to take advantage of calming skills and the maintenance of natural body rhythms,” she said. “This includes sensible nutrition and getting adequate rest and exercise.”
Bernstein also emphasized the importance of trying to maintain hope and optimism while not denying risk. “We also have to think about ethics, to provide the best possible care given the circumstances,” she said. “The crisis standards of care are necessarily different. We are not ethically required to offer futile care, but we must tell the truth.”
She pointed out that resilience is sometimes thought of as returning to the way you were before a stressful or life-altering event. “But here we refer to it as using your coping resources, connecting to others, and cultivating your values and purpose in life as you ride through this time of stress,” Bernstein said. “You are aware of the time it takes to develop and test for treatment and vaccine efficacy, and to then roll out these interventions, so you do know there will be an end to this, hopefully by the summer. While you won’t forget this time, focus on what you can control, your positive relationships, remind yourself of your purpose, and practice gratitude for what you are thankful for in your life. We need to cultivate what is positive and promote the message that emotional health should have the same priority level as physical health. The goal is to flourish.”
Bernstein reported having no financial disclosures.
This article originally appeared on MDedge.com, part of the Medscape Professional Network.
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