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Alzheimer's Caregiving Burnout
By Lilly Binder
Who are they?
Who are they?
As populations begin to age, the demand for caregivers increases to provide necessary support to those who can no longer care for themselves independently. A caregiver is essential to geriatric communities in which they offer a guiding hand to their patients through activities of daily living. This can range anywhere from emotional support to physical assistance with hygiene, dressing, feeding, medication management, and so much more.
Their valuable contributions to others are only as strong as their ability to stay on top of burnout with need based resources. Expressive outlets are valuable as caregivers navigate their own emotional variability in and outside of the workplace.
Demographics
Demographics
More than half of caregivers:
are women
are family members of the recipient
experience depressive symptoms that warrant treatment
report intense stress on a regular basis
Burnout
Burnout
When caring for an individual on a long-term basis, emotional desensitization and exhaustion are likely to occur in the form of burnout. According to The Community Mental Health Journal, burnout is characterized into three distinctive presentations:
Emotional Exhaustion
When discussing the impact of caregiving, it is crucial to recognize the sacrifices made in order to prioritize another person's needs consistently. Due to the intense physical labor and high demands of being a first responder to an elder's needs, caregivers will often experience intense exhaustion and lack of energy for personal endeavors in their free time. This is especially the case when caring for adults with dementia who require more emotional tending as well as physical. Maneuvers such as lifting, transferring, and sometimes physical abuse from agitated patients can result in lasting pain and fatigue. Emotionally, reports of intense stress, depression, and low-quality of life are all unfortunately common results of sustained intensive care environments.
Depersonalization
Often the next step of burnout is depersonalization. This phenomenon occurs when an individual loses a sensitivity to their client's needs. Subtleties will go unnoticed that could indicate a need for assistance, but are no longer perceived at the same rate. Depersonalization heavily impacts the care and client relationship in which the caregiver will demonstrate reluctance to connect with their client deeply, as an avoidant strategy.
Reduced Personal Accomplishment
This aspect presents itself in the form of self perception. Individuals will experience feeling inadequate in their position of unhappiness leading to a deeper sense of unfulfillment. Their insecurity will be reflected in their attitude towards other workers, management, and their patients as frustration and sometimes anger. Job requirements start to feel repetitive and therefore contribute to a feeling of insufficient or lack of progress in their work.
Prevention and Repair
Prevention and Repair
Unsustainable environments perpetuate the cycle of burnout in caregivers, but that doesn't mean it has to be inevitable. Many resources and interventions have been effective in bettering the circumstances of caregivers and are creating a new emphasis on self-preservation in healthcare. Just as caregivers can recognize cues in their patients, they can identify their own needs and modulate their own response.
Talk-Therapy
Talk-Therapy
Attending regular counseling sessions has proven to be an effective preventative practice against burnout.
Education
Education
Continuing education through trainings, online modules, or independent study on the population they're working with allows caregivers to better understand how to navigate their working environment.
Self-Care
Self-Care
Recognizing physical and emotional cues of exhaustion can be met with methods of self care such as time for rest and relaxation.
Developing a Resource
This target group is consistently subjected to intense emotional and physical exhaustion and often lack direction in finding designated supports. I examined first, how burnout presents in this population which was categorized as three main concepts such as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment (Yıldızhan et al., 2018). By identifying the ways in which stressors impact the individual it is easier to conceptualize interventions that will target the recurring issues they face regularly. In a study that tested interventions in the form of talk therapy, the interventions with the highest retention and reduction in negative symptoms included multiple intervention methods at once (Jammal et al., 2024) . Talk therapies were considered ideal and were either accompanied by breathing exercises, educational booklets, or emotionally expressive exercises. From these informative methods, I chose to favor emotional expression in caregivers by designing a journal prompt to follow either independently or within a counseling session. Recipients are to answer the questions honestly in regards to their past and present emotions to an event that they considered challenging. They are then encouraged to reflect on their experience. Afterwards they are prompted to engage in either a breathing, gratitude, sensory awareness, or stretching/yoga exercise. After completing, they can return to the document and express their feelings once again. This time through a different lens and hopefully a calmer mind.
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