A nurse refuses to help an ailing alcoholic who is upset to find a hospital detox unit closed. A hospital clerk brushes off a deceased woman’s grieving family as they try to pay her bills and claim her belongings. A charge nurse keeps the mother of gunshot victim from seeing her son, saying the emergency room is “too busy.”

These harsh, real-life scenarios helped inspire Eve Ekman, a doctoral student in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, to study empathy burnout in the workplace, a condition expected to skyrocket this year due to the stress caused by the nation’s financial crisis.

Eve Ekman

“Many professionals used to burn out and leave their jobs. Now they burn out and stay,” says Ekman, who has worked as a crisis counselor at San Francisco General Hospital for the last five years.

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