ABSTRACT
Over the past 30 years there has been an increasing recognition that workers in the armed forces, emergency services, nursing and social work professions are expected to deal with the immediate horror of death and injury as an integral part of their work, and that as a result they can develop responses to their work, including symptoms of post-traumatic stress, major depression and anxiety (Shalev and Yehuda, 1998; Tehrani, 2004). Less well recognized is the impact of indirect exposures to death, pain and injury through supporting victims (Steed and Bicknell, 2001), reading or analysing accounts of the traumatic events (Vrklevski and Franklin, 2008) or viewing images of traumatic events (Burns et al., 2008). Exposure to distressing or traumatic information in the form of pictures, films, statements or materials is challenging (Cornille and Meyers, 1999). Whilst there is evidence that many police officers, social workers, nurses and others involved in this kind of work have been found to be resilient and able to cope with the demands of their roles, some have found themselves succumbing to a range of psychological conditions, including anxiety, depression, burn-out and secondary traumatic stress (Alexander, 1999; Mitchell et al., 2000). This chapter presents an analysis of a psychological assessment of 182 workers. Those assessed included crime analysts, intelligence officers and others in roles where the workers were indirectly exposed to testimony and other materials relating to child abuse, serious sexual attacks, murders and other traumatic crimes.
