Is burnout a contemporary phenomenon or a timeless human predicament? We delve into the depths of this question, exploring the historical context, societal factors, and personal experiences that shape our understanding of burnout.
What exactly is burnout?
The World Health Organization recognized burnout syndrome in 2019, in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, but only as an occupational phenomenon, not as a medical condition.
- Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out. A 2020 U.S. study put that figure at three-fourths.
- Burnout is widely reported to have grown worse during the pandemic, according to splashy stories that have appeared on television and radio, up and down the Internet, and in most major newspapers and magazines.
- The earth itself suffers from burnout.
Burnout reflects a humanity waging war on itself
“Every age has its signature afflictions,” the Korean-born, Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in “The Burnout Society,” first published in German in 2010.
- Burnout, for Han, is depression and exhaustion, the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity, an “achievement society,” a yes-we-can world in which nothing is impossible, a world that requires people to strive to the point of self-destruction
- Lost in the misty history of burnout is a truth about the patients treated at free clinics in the early seventies: many of them were Vietnam War veterans, addicted to heroin
- In 1980, Freudenberger first reached a popular audience with his claims about “burnout syndrome,” the battle fatigue of Vietnam veterans was recognized by the DSM-III as post-traumatic stress disorder
- Since the late nineteen-seventies, the empirical study has been led by Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1981, she developed the field’s principal diagnostic tool, the Maslack Burnout Inventory, and the following year published “Burnout: The Cost of Caring,” which brought her research to a popular readership
In 1985 Freudenberger published a new book on women’s burnout, “Women’s Burnout: How to Spot It, How to Reverse It, and How to Prevent It.”
In the era of anti-feminist backlash, he was quoted saying “You can’t have it all.”
Coping with Everyday Battles, While Only Saying Yes
Freudenberger died in 1999 at the age of seventy-three.
- His obituary in the Times noted that he worked 14 or 15 hours a day, six days a week until three weeks before his death.
