When Rachel Weiher leaves the archives, the stories she sees stays with her: a Holocaust survivor working with young girls in crisis, a husband writing about his wife’s dementia. 

“Sometimes we are affected by things without realizing how they affect us,” said Weiher, a central processing archivist at the University of Minnesota Libraries. “We look into these people’s lives, and we look at their different traumas from this almost voyeuristic lens. How can that not affect us? How can that not connect with us just as humans?”

From human rights abuses to personal tragedies, the archives are a repository of trauma, and sometimes its architect. Repeated exposure to these traumatic materials leaves an imprint on archivists, researchers, and other patrons of the archives. 

Vicarious trauma, or secondary trauma, is an occupational hazard common among first responders, health-care providers, journalists, and others, which can cause psychological distress and negatively impact physical and mental health.

To mitigate these side effects and avoid vicarious trauma, Weiher and Erin McBrien, interim curator of the Upper Midwest Literary Archives, are working to incorporate trauma-informed care principles into the libraries and archival fields. The pair are currently writing a chapter on the subject for the Society of American Archivists, which will be published later this year. 

“Archives, by their very nature to a lot of communities, are traumatic. It’s a subject that’s been a long time coming,” Weiher said. “Trauma is pervasive, and it affects all of us. You never know what is going on with another person.” 

Identifying the symptoms of trauma

Weiher and McBrien aren’t the first archivists or librarians to apply trauma-informed care principles to the field. But few have worked alongside mental health professionals who have experience practicing that care. 

“You lose something when you haven’t actually practiced that,” Weiher said. 

Before working in the Archives and Special Collections, processing materials in the Minnesota Human Rights Archives, Weiher was a chemical dependency technician at the Hazelden Foundation and a counselor at Fairview Health Services. She also has two master’s degrees, one in substance abuse and addiction counseling from UMN, and another in art history and museum studies from the University of St. Thomas. 

“I liked being able to help people. I liked helping people in crisis,” she said. 

Counseling and archival work overlap in many areas, Weiher explained. They’re both public facing careers that are community-oriented and focused on reparative practices. As she changed careers during the 2020 pandemic, she wanted to integrate the two fields. 

“Museums and archives in general are usually formed in trauma and have a lot of trauma work to do,” she said. 

Archivists are constantly surrounding themselves with traumatizing content and interacting with people suffering from trauma. So how should archivists and curators process traumatic materials? How do they interact with people affected by those collections? 

Firstly, archivists need to understand what trauma looks like, the different forms it can take, and how it can affect our daily lives. We often envision the extreme versions of trauma, Weiher said, like soldiers suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But oftentimes the symptoms are subtle and easy to overlook or misidentify, like the slow progression of emotional withdrawal.

Other symptoms and warning signs include:

• difficulty managing emotions
• feeling emotionally numb or shut down
• fatigue, sleepiness, or difficulty falling asleep
• physical problems or complaints, such as aches, pains, and decreased resistance to illness
• being easily distracted, which can increase one’s risk of accidents
• loss of a sense of meaning in life and/or feeling hopeless about the future
• relationship problems (e.g., withdrawing from friends and family, increased interpersonal conflicts, avoiding intimacy)
• feeling vulnerable or worrying excessively about potential dangers in the world and loved ones’ safety
• increased irritability 
• aggressive, explosive, or violent outbursts and behavior
• destructive coping or addictive behaviors (e.g., over/under eating, substance abuse, gambling, taking undue risks in sports or driving)
• lack of or decreased participation in activities that used to be enjoyable
• avoiding work and interactions with clients or constituents 

Left unaddressed, this could result in depression and anxiety, as well as compassion fatigue, a form of emotional detachment. Another common result is burnout, a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, often caused by stress in our personal and professional lives. 

Trauma doesn’t have to be extreme to have long-lasting effects, Weiher stressed. In fact, people who haven’t previously experienced trauma are more likely to develop negative symptoms after exposure to traumatic materials, in part because they aren’t as likely to identify those symptoms or know effective coping strategies to manage them.

“It’s hard for me to hear when people downplay trauma in general and say, ‘Oh it’s not that bad. It’s not hard,’” Weiher said. “Trauma is trauma, and vicarious trauma is under the umbrella of post-traumatic stress disorder. … It’s important not to downplay that.”  

Take care of yourself

As archivists become more aware of the gaps in traditional collections and become more active in justice and social issues, they’re going to collect more materials on institutionally challenging subjects like systemic violence, genocides, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, McBrien said. 

“As we change as a profession, and as we gain more of these deeply traumatic collections, if we don’t take care of ourselves and learn how to spot and counteract vicarious trauma, we’re not going to have a workforce anymore,” she said. “We’re not going to be able to connect these collections with the people who are most affected by them in a way that is actually compassionate and understanding.” 

There are six core principles of trauma-informed care, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA):

• Safety 
• Trustworthiness and transparency
• Peer support
• Collaboration and mutuality 
• Empowerment, voice, and choice
• Cultural, historical, and gender issues

Safety in the workplace includes personal safety, but also ensuring that workspaces are accessible for people with disabilities, providing resources and flexibility, and providing effective communications channels. That also ties into trustworthiness. Can workers talk openly with their coworkers and supervisors?

Peer support and collaboration could look like having an outlet to talk about vicarious trauma and difficult collections, sharing the workload and leaning on each other. Choice and empowerment are vital, Weiher said. Do workers have the option whether or not to work with traumatic collections? Are they allowed to take breaks as needed? 

For the final category, how are the Libraries supporting minorities in the field, like BIPOC people, LGBTQ people, women, etc.? And are large archival institutions purposefully or inadvertently excluding some researchers and patrons from its collections? 

Libraries in general need to make resources widely available to people who work with archival materials, inform workers about those resources, and encourage people to use them. Those resources should cover full-time staff, as well as those who might not have the financial freedom to see a mental health professional, like temporary and part-time workers and students.

Weiher and McBrien hope that more conversations and awareness around this issue will be the first step in integrating mental health education and trauma-informed care into the archives, and help people open up about vicarious trauma, and provide peer support to better take care of themselves and others. 

“How are we perpetuating trauma that already exists, and what can we do to try and work towards creating more safe spaces?” Weiher said. “Just understanding how it can affect you, how it can affect everything that you do, how it can cause compassion fatigue, how it can cause withdrawal from your work.”