Talk:Burnout (psychology)
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I think there should be a disambiguation page for burnout. What do you guys think? Duke toaster 16:41, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
From the passage:
- Students are also prone to burnout at the high school and college levels; interestingly, this is not a form of work-related burnout, so perhaps this is better understood as a form of depression.
How is this not a form of work-related burnout? Surely, if one is under pressure to always do more work than they can handle *at school*, the health related effects would be similar to some else always doing more work than they can handle *at work*, wouldn't they?
--ErikStewart 21:44, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Burnout at university (US: College) is certainly possible. The paragraph " [healthcare] workers who have frequent intense or emotionally charged interactions with others are more susceptible to burnout" can relate to the university experience too. Certain subjects (those in the design fields for instance) encourage a high degree of attachment to creative project work, which is criticised by peers as a deliberate process of assessment or development; if not monitered (and it usually isn't academically) burnout can certainly be the result in some cases. The actual level of work undertaken is a seperate, though not unrelated, variable. And of course the students/pupils almost by definition get no *material reward* (re Pieter Hintjens' post below). Graldensblud 00:26, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
It's not a form of work-related burnout, simply because school is technically not work. Work, in this context, means paid employment. That technicality should not diminish the serious nature of school-related burnout. Is there any research literature suggesting that school-related burnout is somehow different in nature? I don't think the article still says, "so perhaps this is better understood as a form of depression," but if it does, I'm going to remove that clause.
--Dwinetsk 20:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I've experienced burnout and seen it in many people, especially in volunteer projects (open source, and associations). My analysis is that it's not related to the stress or the work, but to the economic equilibrium of specific projects. This is also why burnout is usually (always?) work-related. What I think happens is this: an individual will invest a certain amount of energy and time in a project, expecting some benefit. The short-term benefit can be moral support but in the longer term it must be economic, reflected in one's standard of living. If the long-term benefit's don't appear, the individual becomes disillusioned and develops a strong aversion to the project, which shows itself as burnout. I've also worked with people who have experienced this, and found that providing such individuals with a good economic basis (e.g. a paid job) can cure the burnout. Money prevents and cures burnout. This is why charities that survive always end-up with a core of (low-paid) professionals. Ditto for open source projects.
To summarise:
- burnout is project-related.
- burnout hits men more often than women.
- burnout hits people after a certain period, usually 18-24 months, depending on the character and circumstances.
- burnout is caused by severe economic disbalance, caused by over-investment in a project that does not pay back.
- burnout can express itself as severe depression, anger, poor health.
- burnout is especially frequent in charities, associations, and open source projects where people work for no money under heavy peer pressure.
- burnout is preventable, and curable, by ensuring all hard work is fairly rewarded (economically, not emotionally).
There are many other forms of depression and tiredness but (work-related) burnout seems quite a specific syndrome.
Lastly: people who think emotional rewards (kudos) are enough to substitute for economic rewards are wrong - in fact emotional rewards often bind people even tighter to their projects, causing worse burnout in the long term.
If someone with better wiki skills than me want to add my explanation to the article, that'd be nice.
-- Pieter Hintjens 10:34, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
"burnout hits men more often than women" I find this curious. If its true, why? Is it to do with gender equality in many professions not having been reached? Different expectations between gender?
"projects where people work for no money under heavy peer pressure." That sounds like university, too. Re my earlier post.
"Lastly: people who think emotional rewards (kudos) are enough to substitute for economic rewards are wrong - in fact emotional rewards often bind people even tighter to their projects, causing worse burnout in the long term." I concur.
Graldensblud 21:28, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] "Economic cause" is original research
I'm removing the following paragraph:
Burnout is a common syndrome in volunteer organisations, for example open-source software development teams, which suggests that long-term economic instability can be a contributing factor. Some reports indicate that burnout is project specific, so an individual may be unable to work in one context, but fully functional in another.[citation needed] Anecdotal evidence suggests a treatment for burnout, based on changing the economic model governing the work in question. For example, the switch from volunteer to paid work can apparently cure burnout.[citation needed]
This is obviously only the personal opinion of Pieter Hintjens who requested that his analysis be added. This paragraph was added soon after his request above. However, this is "orginal research" (in Wikipedia's terminology) and actually contradicts the wide body of research that has been conducted over the last couple of decades on this common psychological phenomenon (see the rest of this article and its references).
Pieter Hintjens, if you can find any documented literature to back up your personal analysis, you or other users are perfectly justified in putting it back in. However, I could not find any such thing. I've been doing a lot of research on the phenomenon recently (I will be doing a training on it, soon) and was not able to find any research backing up the claim that it is "project specific" or "caused by long-term economic instability." In fact, the only study I could find looking into economic factors found no correlation.
I believe that you are simply not talking about burnout syndrome but your own personal experience of feeling frustrated and unappreciated with a volunteer project you were working on. As noted at the top of the article, the word burnout is often used to describe such feelings, but this is a colloquial use (i.e. meant to refer only figuratively to the actual psychological phenomenon). These feelings in and of themselves are not burnout syndrome -- a complex syndrome composed of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and decreased feeling of personal accomplishment at work. Burnout syndrome, as I believe is stated in the article, is usually identified using the Maslach Burnout index. This index has become the standard for distinguishing burnout syndrome from any temporary and resolvable negative feelings about a specific work project or contract.
With regards to the theory that money prevents and cures burnout syndrome, I would be curious to see why then so many doctors and nurses suffer from burnout. Doctors are among the highest paid professionals in the United States, and nurses are generally not in poverty either. Following from this theory, they, doctors especially, should have one of the lowest rates of burnout, not the highest. It's simply not a sound theory, and I can't see any burnout researcher taking it seriously. I certainly didn't find one in my recent review of the literature.
In any case, none of this "research" ("introspection" seems more apt a term to me) has been published that I've ever heard of, so it does not belong in a Wikipedia entry.
--Dwinetsk 20:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Unnecessary sentences
I'm also removing the following two sentences:
- "Burnout is often used generally to describe a lethargic feeling related to work"
- "Burnout differs from other mental health conditions, such as depression, as it is not chemical but is related to work."
The first sentence is redundant because it already says at the top of the article that the word burnout is used as a slang word for general exhaustion at work.
The second sentence is simply not true. There is a chemical component underlying all mental conditions. The chemistry of the brain is what is producing the thoughts and feelings associated with burnout syndrome. Though such research has not been done, if you were to test levels of diffuse modulatory neurotransmitters (e.g. serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine) in the brains of sufferers of burnout you would see alterations.. The author of this sentence, I gather, is getting at the strong role played by environmental factors in burnout -- that it is not somatic in origin. However, "other mental illnesses" often also have environmental components, and some, such as PTSD, like burnout, are almost entirely associated with environmental causes. There is no solid reason to make this distinction except to try to alleviate the stigma associated with mental illness, but in so doing, we must not further stigmatize those mental illnesses that are endogenous in origin (that are "chemical").
In any case, there has not, to my knowledge, been any research on the neurochemistry of burnout for us to cite, so we'll just leave this question out of the article.
--Dwinetsk 20:58, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I noticed an anonymous user stuffed, "especially EMTs and Paramedics" into a sentence about healthcare workers. Is this true? I've worked as both an EMT and as a case manager (a form of social work) and didn't find EMTs and medics any more prone to burnout than social workers, per se. Most of the research on burnout is on nurses and social workers, though there is plenty on doctors and psychologists. Have I simply missed some material in my research that shows burnout to be especially common among EMTs and medics? I certainly wouldn't be surprised, but I'm uncomfortable with keeping this in here if it isn't based in published research (rather than the personal experience of one EMT or medic). -Dwinetsk 20:54, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
Okay, it's been three weeks and no justification for the EMT/medic thing has appeared. I'm getting rid of it. -Dwinetsk 18:37, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Can someone make a citation for the following quote? "While many researchers argue that burnout refers exclusively to a work-related syndrome of exhaustion and depersonalization/cynicism, others feel that burnout is a special case of the more general clinical depression or just a form of extreme fatigue/exhaustion (thus omitting the cynicism component)" I haven't found such a controversy in the literature but I'm loathe to remove something about a controversy without giving other editors the chance to show it exists. I just haven't seen it, and worry it's original research. Dwinetsk 20:22, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
