Job stress and mental health of child-counseling office workers

In Japan, consultations concerning child abuse cases are increasing rapidly, and the mental health of child-counseling office workers, who must deal with them, has emerged as an issue. To measure the state of mental health of these workers, and to clarify the characteristics of their job-related stress, we sent a questionnaire to 69 workers of child-counseling offices in Ibaraki Prefecture and obtained responses from 45. (1) Their job environment was characterized as high demand/low control/low reward. (2) The mean score of GHQ-12 of the subjects was 5.9 +/- 3.6, indicating a very poor state of mental health. (3) Stress due to physical and verbal assaults by the parties involved in the cases and the psychological burden of intervention were found to be related to their poor mental health. Along with measures to prevent such assaults, training in intervention techniques, supervision, and care for psychological trauma are needed for child-counseling office workers.