Question
What is burnout?
Answer
Burnout is one of these terms we have heard, which ultimately is a good thing. If there is one thing that we can sort of get from the pandemic and how much stress it created in our communities, it also did shine a light on a lot of issues that were already there, but they are rising to the surface as far as the awareness level. It is always the first step to addressing any issue related to health and well-being on the social scale or at the individual scale. Burnout may be recognized as a term that has been used to talk about drug addicts that have done many drugs, they are burnt out. Their brains do not work as well. That is actually where the term came from. A psychologist was studying people who worked at an addiction center, not those suffering from addiction, but those who worked there in New York City. This was in the '70s. He was observing and studying them and noticed this ailment, the phenomenon happening to these people. They were dedicated to their work. They were working long hours, working more and more and more, and starting to get exhausted, getting more cynical about the whole situation, both the individual people they were working with, the system, and all of that.
They were starting to feel like they were not being effective, but they were also starting to stay at work even when they did not have to because they did not have anything to say, "go home to." That paints a pretty dark picture of where this term originated, these very deeply dedicated people that were in a people-serving profession. You are health professionals, educators, and people working in social services and nonprofits. There are lots of people serving fields. It draws people who want to help others, and the dynamics around burnout affect everything. The individual person, family, friends, and any social situations. It is also been linked to dishonest behavior, decreased altruism, alcohol abuse, and abuse of other substances. It is detrimental to patient care and to mortality. It is linked to lawsuits, and it is very common. According to these definitions, about half of physicians, 43% of nurses, and 79% of RTs in the COVID pandemic said they experienced burnout. You may have experienced it yourself. I am now hearing people talk about how you cannot recover from burnout. What is meant by that statement is that it is the idea of getting to the point where you essentially do not want to do your job anymore. Now seeing this trend of great resignation and people that can leave, want to leave, and leave their jobs, we are talking about being unable to recover. You can recover, and it can be prevented. It can be healed. There are all sorts of things that we can do, it is a holistic approach. It shows that it is prevalent does not mean it is something that everybody will deal with, and it should be normalized. It is something that is a major concern.
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.
