As someone who occasionally (or sometimes more than occasionally) says the wrong thing in an attempt to be helpful or comforting of "fix" the situation, I was particularly terrified by a recent article in the
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Beehr, Bowling, and Bennett's article titled "Occupational stress and failures of social support: When helping hurts" appears in this month's JOHP. In the interest of full disclosure (my personal motto), I'll admit that my university does not yet have full access to the article and my own personal hard copy has not arrived in the mail yet (one of the pitfalls of living in rural America), thus I can only provide a link to the
abstract.