Question
How is burnout measured?
Answer
- Emotional Exhaustion (EE): feeling maxed out and not able to offer emotional support
- Depersonalization (DP): negative/cynical attitude towards/of the patient
- Personal Accomplishment (PA): is reduced, plus escapism
The three components of measuring burnout are these three aspects, and you can reflect if you have had these before. I know I have had burnout and a long recovery process to recover. Emotional exhaustion is the feeling of being maxed out and how you know you get to that point where you cannot offer emotional support to other people. It is the concept of not having a full cup to offer others. Depersonalization is this negative or cynical attitude towards the patient. Take a moment and consider that if you have had a day where you come home, and complain about this patient that is not taking care of themselves, is being rude to you, why does it even matter? The system is messed up anyway, and these people are not improving. Or it is insane at work and this spiraling negative attitude. Consider for a moment that may not be about your core attitudes, character, demeanor, and disposition. That it could be a symptom of burnout. Decoupling is important because it can be scary thinking about any mental illness. Like this is what I am like now, this is me, and it will always be like this, which is scary.
Looking at these measures as symptoms are things that can "come and go," are part of this thing that we can catch like a cold, and it can be persistent, but it is not part of our core. Your feeling of personal accomplishment is reduced. Add to that escapism which is very common, and a lot of this stuff talking about the research and the patterns is textbook. It almost decouples it from something "wrong with you." These are patterns that are observed in people over time. This idea of personal accomplishment is huge. This is also related to workload, and I work with many people with many goals, part of the healing process is to reduce those goals by about 99% to start building that sense of accomplishment. We will talk about the external and workplace factors that we cannot control that are pressing on all of us. These are the three pieces of burnout as far as how it is measured from almost a clinical standpoint. We talked about filling your cup and being able to offer that to others. We did not talk about how to fill your cup, we will get to that.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Burned Out: How to Heal and Protect Our Mental Health at Work, presented by Sophie Nathenson, Ph.D., Medical Sociology.
