Into the Field of Suffering Finding the Other Side of Burnout

Healthcare providers are constantly confronted with illness and injury, and the challenges of healing. Yet this very work, the relief of suffering, inflicts on healthcare providers suffering of their own that is often crippling. The most common terms for the pain caregivers and healers suffer from are burnout and moral distress. These common terms are, however, often used judgmentally--as if those trying to heal others have failed themselves, their colleagues, and their patients. The net result is that much discussion of burnout and moral distress, and the interventions they underwrite, have served only to worsen the crisis.

Into the Field of Suffering: Finding the Other Side of Burnout provides a much-needed reframing of burnout and moral distress. These depleting experiences are approached as trials virtually inevitable in the course of the healer's vocation. The challenge medical professionals and caregivers face is not avoiding them, but meeting them directly with insight into the role of moral distress and burnout in the development of their vocation. Into the Field of Suffering presents a set of analytical frameworks and awareness skills, which have the potential to transform the work of healers and caregivers.

There is a growing body of academic literature on these topics, and many memoirs recounting distressing situations and wounding traumas. Into the Field of Suffering takes its place alongside these works, while offering a distinctly different approach that treats as essential the spiritual dimension of the healing vocation. Practices, teachings and dialogues to assist in the cultivation of compassion and gratitude are key components in this presentation.

Schenck and Neely address their readers in a direct voice, speaking to the sense of failure and discouragement so many healthcare professionals and caregivers experience on a daily basis. This is a book that carries a mentor's voice and presence, born out of experience with burnout and moral distress, and grounded in hundreds of conversations, de-briefings and interviews with healthcare workers and caregivers, patients and families.

David Schenck is the former Director of the Ethics Program, Medical University of South Carolina, and was on the faculty of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is co-author of two books that approach ethics and healing in healthcare from an empirical perspective, Healers: Extraordinary Clinicians at Work (Oxford, 2015) and What Patients Teach: Everyday Ethics of Healthcare (Oxford, 2013). Schenck taught philosophy and religion for 20 years and has published widely in bioethics, philosophy, and religious studies. He was founding executive director of a free medical clinic, healthcare advocate for the homeless, and a 25-year hospice volunteer.

Scott Neely is minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina. He serves as strategist for Speaking Down Barriers, an organization that uses art and facilitated dialogue to build our life together across differences that divide us. He has helped develop LGBTQ Theologies--a network of congregations supporting LGBTQ+ people and issues in Upstate South Carolina, and the Fund to Support Latinx Immigrants--a state-wide coalition providing direct assistance to immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he has taught at the University of South Carolina-Upstate and Wofford College.

Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources and Method

Invitation: For You Who Do This Work

Part I. Vocation as Path
Chapter 1. The Healing Vocation
Chapter 2. On Depletion and Burnout: Reframing the Darkness
Chapter 3. How Breakthrough Happens: The Mutuality of Healing
Chapter 4. The Practice of Replenishment and Renewal: Core Exercises
Chapter 5. In Conclusion: On Healing Presence and Gratitude

Part II. The Dialogues: Deepening Capacity
Dialogue 1. Honing the Exercises
Dialogue 2. The Exercises as Spiritual Disciplines
Dialogue 3. The Essential Skill of Advocacy
Dialogue 4. The Field of Suffering Is the Field of Healing
Dialogue 5. The Fulcrum and the Great Compassion

Appendix: A Practice Calendar
References
Index