Links to Leaving It At The Office:

Preface

Welcome to our ebook about self-care for graduate students and helping professionals in the mental health fields.

One of the courses I teach in the doctoral program is an advanced practicum for psychology students where we devote about half the course to learning about self-care. This ebook is a result of work by students in that course as well as several other doctoral students who edited this ebook: Courtney Copeland, Yi Li, and Eleanor McCabe. Each editor contributed equally and so the author order is alphabetical.

It’s interesting that work in this area is called self-care. Working with clients and patients in mental health and other social service professions can be rewarding as well as demanding and stressful. The question becomes, who is responsible for the care of the person who provides the care? As someone who does research on occupational stress and burnout, I know that people vary in their ability to cope with the demands of their work. At the same time, I think it is highly likely that many people who work full-time in mental health and social services experience at least a moderate degree of stress and burnout. The question becomes, who’s responsible for preventing or ameliorating that?

What is the organization responsible for? If you work in mental health, education, or social services, the organization you work for is likely to be under-resourced. The most obvious sign of that is that there are not enough people to do the work or do the work well. In such a situation, it is common for employees to feel stressed, anxious, or otherwise distressed. Self-care is often referenced as a potential remedy for students and professionals to manage such situations. But in some of the burnout literature, the role of the organization is seen as more important than the role of self. And that sometimes can be missing in the self-care literature.

One of the major motivations for creating this ebook is to share and preserve the good work produced by University at Buffalo doctoral students who read the self-care book, Leaving It at the Office, as part of their advanced practicum course. Online links for the 2 editions of this book precede this preface. In our doctoral practicum course, students summarize and lead class discussions about each chapter, and these summaries are presented by chapter. Consequently, we used the chapters of this book as the framework for our ebook.

At the start of each chapter, there is a brief video overview to orient you to significant issues and research. Then each chapter summary includes content from the self-care book and links to relevant videos and other material so that you may hear additional voices and ideas about these topics. The links are designed to be an additional resource about the topic and not a definitive or legal description of the topic.

Regarding this ebook platform, when you click on a link you are taken to that site and must use the back button to return to the ebook. Also note that in the back matter, the Glossary and Index have been combined so when you when you click on a term, you are taken to the place in the ebook where that term is defined and described. This ebook is open source so that the instructor or presenter can revise the material as long as we’re acknowledged. One change that might be made is to use the word “patient” if that is more appropriate for your setting than “client.”

Finally, I want to acknowledge the contributions of Chelsea Schnorrbusch who compiled the summaries produced by her classmates during the Spring 2020 semester.

I hope you find the information about self-care in this ebook informative and helpful.

Scott T. Meier, Ph.D.
stmeier@buffalo.edu
University at Buffalo
August, 2021