AUTHOR=Zerban Matthias , Puhlmann Lara Marie Christine , Lassri Dana , Fonagy Peter , Montague P. Read , Kiselnikova Natalia , Lorenzini Nicolas , Desatnik Alex , Kalisch Raffael , Nolte Tobias 

TITLE=What helps the helpers? Resilience and risk factors for general and profession-specific mental health problems in psychotherapists during the COVID-19 pandemic

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=14

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1272199

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1272199

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<sec id="sec1"><title>Introduction</title><p>Although the COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected wellbeing of at-risk groups, most research on resilience employed convenience samples. We investigated psychosocial resilience and risk factors (RFs) for the wellbeing of psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, an under-researched population that provides essential support for other at-risk groups and was uniquely burdened by the pandemic.</p></sec><sec id="sec2"><title>Method</title><p>We examined 18 psychosocial factors for their association with resilience, of which four were chosen due to their likely relevance specifically for therapists, in a cross-sectional multi-national sample (<italic>N</italic> = 569) surveyed between June and September 2020. Resilience was operationalized dimensionally and outcome-based as lower stressor reactivity (SR), meaning fewer mental health problems than predicted given a participant’s levels of stressor exposure. General SR (SR<sub>G</sub>) scores expressed reactivity in terms of general internalizing problems, while profession-specific SR (SR<sub>S</sub>) scores expressed reactivity in terms of burnout and secondary trauma, typical problems of mental health practitioners.</p></sec><sec id="sec3"><title>Results</title><p>Factors previously identified as RFs in other populations, including perceived social support, optimism and self-compassion, were almost all significant in the study population (SR<sub>G</sub>: 18/18 RFs, absolute βs = 0.16–0.40; SR<sub>S</sub>: 15/18 RFs, absolute βs = 0.19–0.39 all <italic>P</italic>s &lt; 0.001). Compassion satisfaction emerged as uniquely relevant for mental health practitioners in regularized regression.</p></sec><sec id="sec4"><title>Discussion</title><p>Our work identifies psychosocial RFs for mental health practitioners’ wellbeing during crisis. Most identified factors are general, in that they are associated with resilience to a wider range of mental health problems, and global, in that they have also been observed in other populations and stressor constellations.</p></sec>