In March, I attended An Evening with Gabor Maté at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. The evening was mild, with clear skies and comfortable temperatures for an early spring night in Vancouver. For me, events at this venue invariably provoke both emotional and cognitive dissonance. The theatre’s architectural elegance is shadowed by the enduring colonial legacy of its namesake and is simultaneously juxtaposed by the building’s uneasy proximity to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I am caught between two worlds where comfort, affluence, and privilege brush blindly up against human suffering shaped by poverty, addiction, and marginalization.
The theatre’s patrons park their Teslas in underground lots, then walk a few blocks in expensive shoes, navigating crowded intersections and streets crowded with figures caught in the undertow of the toxic drug crisis, averting their gaze from the dystopian reality of human suffering butted right up against their cozy destination. The air smells of exhaust. Inside the theatre, we settle into velvet-covered seats and prepare to listen to Maté talk about compassion fatigue. His words are familiar, as I have heard him many times, but something is not landing for me this time.
Maté contends that our collective compassion fatigue is rooted less in depleted care for others, and more in our failure to extend compassion toward ourselves. As he says this, a woman seated directly in front of me takes no fewer than five pictures of herself from different angles and posts them to her social media. With each soft whoosh of her iPhone, something rises higher in the back of my throat, a faint, physical protest at the incongruity between the message being broadcast from the stage, and the performance happening one row ahead of me. I find myself wondering: is this an example of compassion fatigue, or is this simply a moment untouched by compassion altogether? Holding compassion in this moment feels unexpectedly difficult, as if the effort itself is part of the lesson. What is happening here? Am I actually daring to disagree with Gabor Maté?
But I might disagree with Gabor Maté. (Please don’t tell him.) And it frustrates me to disagree with Gabor Maté, a man whose books and lectures have always found me an enthusiastic audience. In fact, I once took great comfort in Maté’s suggestion that my compassion fatigue could be rooted in something as altruistic as self-neglect in favour of others. But is that accurate?
In environments that are saturated with visible suffering, research shows that we may self-regulate by directing our emotional attention away from those in need. This process can dampen our compassion as a protective strategy against empathic overload (Cameron & Payne, 2011). I’m looking at you, lady taking selfies in the row ahead of me. But I’m also pointing at myself, and other school counsellors who are experiencing, or who have experienced compassion fatigue at work. Compassion fatigue, in my experience, is not just a matter of failing to turn care inward, but rather it is largely a matter of working in a system that makes sustained compassion logically challenging if not impossible.
Despite our best intentions and genuinely robust self-care practices that include self-compassion, many school counsellors are working within structures that erode their capacity to serve. A review of the literature identifies non-counselling duties, overwhelming caseloads, and role ambiguity as significant predictors of burnout and compassion fatigue for school counsellors (Bardhoshi et al., 2014). Similarly, a qualitative study of Arizona school counsellors found that institutional pressures including excessive caseloads, limited leadership support, and inadequate systemic responsiveness were primary causes of counsellor distress. This research concluded with recommendations for reduced and equitable workloads, invested leadership, and increased professional development as potential mitigators for school counsellor compassion fatigue (Manganaro, 2023).
These findings are consistent with broader research in education and helping professions. A 2023 study of teachers in Maine revealed that while personal resilience and self-compassion matter, these are insufficient in the absence of a positive organizational climate, adequate resources, and a culture that values staff wellbeing (National Education Association, 2023). Global research on mental health professionals highlights the fact that professional expertise, confidence, and self-efficacy, fostered through supportive systems, buffer against compassion fatigue more effectively than self-care alone (Hong & Wang, 2024). In the context of school counselling, this suggests that lasting protection against compassion fatigue is unlikely to come from self-compassion strategies alone. Institutional structures must prioritize manageable workloads, role clarity, and consistent support through supervision.
When I consider my own experience as a secondary school counsellor, I am extremely aware that in the stressful weeks leading up to major academic transitions, my time that would ideally be spent supporting students with these transitions, is primarily eaten up with administrative duties around creating and adjusting student schedules. These tasks, although not unimportant, consume the hours that I would otherwise spend in direct contact with students, providing counselling support. The time I would rather devote to human connection shrinks to the margins of my calendar.
An ideal support model for school counsellors would start with reasonable caseloads, with numbers that align with recommended ratios, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This would ensure better role protection, so the bulk of hours could be spent in counselling rather than in clerical and administrative work. Ideally, time would be built-in for collaboration and supervision, in recognition of the fact that peer consultation and clinical supervision are necessary for ethical practice.
In this light, compassion fatigue in school counselling seems to me to be less of a personal failing or the simple result of inadequate self-compassion, and more like a healthy and necessary signal that the system is demanding more of us than we can sustainably provide. When our job portfolios are swollen with administrative and clerical responsibilities, and when caseloads are stretched far beyond ethical guidelines, the structure of our work leaves us with no space to breathe. Compassion fatigue is not a flaw in the counsellor; it is the natural consequence of systemic overload.
I remain grateful to Gabor Maté for continuing to inspire me in innumerable ways. I still believe in his wisdom where it comes to self-compassion, self-care, and looking inward. But stopping our examination here risks an incomplete diagnosis of the problem and quietly shifts the responsibility away from systems and onto the shoulders of already overburdened helpers. Compassion fatigue is not solely about neglecting the self. It is also about neglecting to create and foster environments in which compassion can be sustained. As school counsellors, we have an important role to play as advocates for change. Our challenge here is not just to care for ourselves, but to hold our systems accountable for caring for us, knowing that if they fail us, they also fail the students whom the systems are designed to serve.
Driving home from the Queen Elizabeth Theatre later that night, the streets were quieter. I passed clusters of people huddled in doorways, their outlines shadowy and blurred. The selfie-taking woman lingered in one corner of my mind, reminding me of how easy it is to fold into one’s own reflection and miss what is unfolding all around us. I thought more about Maté’s words and the delicate thread that keeps compassion alive in places steeped in unrelenting need. In that moment and in that place, it felt as if compassion fatigue was not just something I had carried home from work, but something woven into the human condition itself. Whether contemplating streetscape or school-scape, the quiet dulling of compassion lingers, like the afterimage of the selfie woman’s camera flash, briefly blinding, slow to fade.
References
Bardhoshi, G., Schweinle, W., & Duncan, K. (2014). Understanding school counselor burnout: A longitudinal analysis. Professional School Counseling, 18(1), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.5330/prsc.18.1.g628024223546448
Cameron, C. D., & Payne, B. K. (2011). Escaping affect: How motivated emotion regulation creates insensitivity to mass suffering. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021643
Hong, S., & Wang, Z. (2024). Understanding the impact of expertise on compassion fatigue in counseling via core self-evaluation and resilience. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 22607. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-73666-4
Manganaro, C. A. (2023). The lived experiences of Arizona high school counselors with compassion fatigue (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University). Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/14729
National Education Association. (2023). Compassion fatigue in teachers: The importance of systemic support. NEA Today.
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/compassion-fatigue-teachers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lisa Porter, CCC, former school counsellor, current Associate Director at City University M.Ed. School Counselling program
