1. Burnout History Flashcards
First person to use “burnout” in a clinical sense
Freudenberger
Developed the most widely used questionnaire for assessing burnout
Maslach
MBI
Maslach Burnout Inventory
Gradual emotional depletion, loss of motivation, and reduced commitment
Burnout (Freudenberger)
An accesible and easy-to-use questionnaire for assessing burnout.
Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI)
The human service sector, and especially in health care, education, social work, psychotherapy, legal services, and law enforcement.
Caring professions
Factors of burnout (Human Services Sector)
1) Frustrated idealism to eradicate poverty (1960s).
2) Helping professions became modern occupations (bureaucratization, job descriptions) instead of a calling
3) “Lack of reciprocity”, the Cultural revolution (1960s) made people demand care, service, empathy and compassion. No more recognition and gratitude.
Factors of burnout (Socio-cultural)
1) Individualization. Erosion of social communities and networks (church, neighborhood, family)
2) Narcissism. Self-absorbed, manipulative individuals that demanded instant gratification
Historical roots of burnout
1) Shakespeare “burn’d out”.
2) Bible: Elijah and Moses.
Gloom-filled thoughts, disillusioned, and suffers from fatigue, apathy, and cynicism.
Burnout
Burnout is a maladaptive strategy
An attempt to cope with the emotional demands of the job.
Vicious circle.
Increasing emotional demands are the root causes of burnout that lead to exhaustion. Depersonalization (or mental distancing) aggravates this process and is considered an inappropriate attempt to cope with these emotional demands.
Feeling exhausted, weak, used-up, worn-out, and overburdened
Loss of energy
Disillusionment, poor morale, disengagement, withdrawal, cynicism, depersonalization, and the loss of drive and interest
Loss of motivation
Accelerated modern life puts excessive demands on people’s brains, which in turn, weakens and depletes their nerve force, thus causing symptoms such as exhaustion, anxiety, despair, insomnia, indigestion, palpations, and migraines
Neurasthenia
Shared symptoms between neurasthenia and burnout
1) Mental exhaustion is a defining symptom
2) Product of social changes (agricultural into industrial society; industrial society into a post-industrial service-oriented society)
3) Ordinary trouble and affection (Not pathological)
4) Attempts to exploit commercially these conditions
Depression and Burnout symptoms overlap. They share at least one core symptom:
Exhaustion
Difference between Depression and Burnout
Symptoms of burnout tend to be job related and situation specific.
Depression is general and pervasive.
Factors of burnout (Western Phenomenon)
High job demands and coping styles driven by avoidance
1) Globalization, privatization, and liberalization create a necessity to acquire new skills, adopt to new types of work, achieve higher productivity, acceleration and increase temporal pressures.
2) Social fragmentation, individualization and the “me culture”
3) Feel uncomfortable with uncertainty
4) Accept power is distributed unequally
5) Career success over quality of life
Burnout components
1) Depersonalization
2) Reduced personal accomplishment
3) Exhaustion
The concept of burnout is restricted to modern, industrialized, and urbanized societies.
Yes, because depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment are ethnocentric concepts that cannot be applied in traditional societies.
The concept of burnout originated in
US, 1970s
In these countries, social security systems cover sickness and work incapacity pensions for burnout
Sweden and Netherlands
Burnout (World Health Organization)
Problems related to life management and difficulty category.
Described as “a state of vital exhaustion”.
Much room of interpretation by medical professionals.
If burnout is to be considered a mental condition that renders sufferers elegible for financial compensation
Specific diagnostic criteria should be developed
The Royal Dutch Medical Association guidelines for stress-related disorders
1) Mild distress (minimal)
2) Serious distress (temporal loss of occupational role)
3) Burnout (long-term loss of occupational role)
Final stage of a chronic exhaustion process that prevents employees from fulfilling their occupational roles.
Overspannenheid (overstrain, or surmenage)
Dutch term for what is known as Burnout in the US
Burnout in the Netherlands
Severe psychological disorder. The final stage of a long-term process of exhaustion from which it is very difficult to recover.
Burnout popularity
North America: non-medical, socially accepted label that carries very little stigma.
Europe: Official diagnosis that opens the gates of the welfare state, compensation claims and treatment programes
Exhaustion
Context-free, universal, psychological experience, which neither seems restricted to a particular historial era nor to a particular culture.
Links burnout with depression.
Burnout as discovered in US (1970s)
Specific to modern, advanced societies that are characterized by social fragmentation and individualization.
Work-related and context-bound condition.
Culture-specific notion. Occurs exclusively in cultures where “jobs”, “occupations” and “professions” exist.
Specificity of burnout
Combination of:
1) Exhaustion
2) Mental distancing (depersonalization, cynicism)
3) Reduced personal accomplishment
Burnout conclusion
Burnout is a psychological condition that is rooted in a specific historical and socio-cultural context.
