All posts tagged: Secondary Trauma

Students in the classroom

Case Selection and Secondary Trauma

I don’t relish my student’s traumatic experiences. I am happy, however, that they are happening with me there to support them. Perhaps I should be a little less overtly honest about it with my students. As they came in over the last few weeks to relay some of their traumatic experiences to me, maybe I should not have moved so quickly to tell my students how much I thought they were learning from it and instead commiserated more on how bad it must be to experience clients’ trauma for the first time. One student, on meeting his SSI client for the first time, had her tell him it wasn’t worth living once she was denied benefits and that she had considered killing herself over the case. Another student went before an ALJ quite convinced that her severely mentally ill client should win only to have the ALJ badger her and the client about drug use that seemed truly irrelevant. Like many clinicians, I have sent students to see dying clients, had clients insult and run …