ABSTRACT
Occupational stress affects almost every profession. However, it is now widely accepted that mental health professionals are at an elevated risk, with a greater number of potential sources of stress having an impact on their health (Hannigan, Edward & Burnard, 2004; Lim et al., 2010). For these reasons, more attention is now being placed at a stage prior to their incorporation into the workplace: their training period. This paper describes research conducted for the author’s ongoing PhD project. In this project, stress is conceptualised as a transaction between a person and their environment (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). According to this approach stress occurs when an individual appraises their environmental demands as outweighing their abilities to meet those demands. Two groups of trainee mental health professionals are of central concern here; trainee clinical psychologists and psychiatric nursing students. A sample of PhD students acts as an additional control group. These groups have been selected due to the multiple stressors that they face, and the high levels of stress and mental illness reported in the literature (Pakenham, 2012; Pulido-Martos et al., 2014).
