Iraq War Vet Counselors Battling Traumatic Stress

Chad Peterson, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco and clinical instructor in psychiatry at UCSF, has spent thousands of hours counseling combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and now finds he is battling some of the same symptoms he's treating in his patients. "Compassion fatigue" or "secondary PTSD," said Peterson, is about "taking in the feelings of the person you're trying to help." Self-care is the key to treating compassion fatigue, he noted. Related Links: Iraq War Vet Counselors Battling Traumatic Stress KPIX-TV (CBS), April 27, 2007 Chad Peterson, MD, PhD Discusses Compassion Fatigue in Newsweek UCSF Department of Psychiatry, March 14, 2007 How Do You Sleep? A Conversation with Tom Neylan, MD UCSF Science Café, March 23, 2007