Occupational Therapy News OTnews February 2020 | Page 50

REPORT MENTAL HEALTH
Compassion for ourselves
and our clients
Eddie
Stern, Yoga
teacher and
author from New
York explains about
down regulation of the
nervous system using
yoga approaches
Katy Bergson
looks at the topic of
compassion in healthcare
and reports from a recent
compassionate mental
health gathering
The
entrance to
Buckland Hall
Left:
Participant
reads a poem
about their experience
of mental health services
Right: Small moments of connection
captured during the two day event.
O
ne of the core values occupational therapists
try to uphold in our work is compassion. The
Cambridge Dictionary defines compassion
as ‘a strong feeling of sympathy and
sadness for the suffering or bad luck of others and a
wish to help them’ (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/
dictionary/english/compassion).
Every occupational therapist I know has their own
stories of times when their place of work has not felt like
a compassionate environment, for service users or for
themselves as workers.
In mental health services, with more extreme power
dynamics, including service users who are subject to
sections and widely acknowledged funding and staffing
challenges (Gilbert 2018), the idea of compassionate
care feels particularly important.
50 OTnews February 2020
This dictionary definition points to part of what makes
compassion difficult to maintain; the witnessing and
holding of another’s sadness or suffering.
The work of researchers such as Van Dernoot Lipsky
and Burk (2009) calls this position ‘trauma stewardship’
and argues that there is a need to care for ourselves as
practitioners, as well as those we work with.
So shared spaces in which service users, carers
and workers come together with equal platform and
voice, are hugely important. This may explain why the
Compassionate Mental Health are powerfully catalysing
events.
When I attended the recent two-day gathering, I had
high expectations, which were met through listening to
passionate talks, joining experiential workshops, and
many moments of small individual connections.