Burnout or depression: both individual and social issue

Journal of Health Psychology, 2013

International Journal of Stress Management, 2014

Whether burnout and depression cover the same psychopathology remains to be elucidated. To date, subtypes of depression have been overlooked in research on the burnout-depression overlap. Our aim was to estimate the prevalence of depressive disorders in workers with burnout while examining the overlap of burnout with the atypical subtype of depression. The present study included 5,575 schoolteachers (mean age ϭ 41 years; 78% female). Burnout was assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Depression was measured with the 9-item depression scale of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Atypical features of depression were examined using a dedicated module, referenced to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). We found that 90% of the teachers identified as burned out met diagnostic criteria for depression. Among them, 92% scored 15 or higher on the PHQ-9, a threshold at which active treatment with pharmacotherapy and/or psychotherapy is recommended. The features of atypical depression were observed in 63% of the burned-out participants with major depression. Emotional exhaustion, the hallmark of burnout, was more strongly associated with depression than with depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment, the 2 other putative dimensions of burnout. The present study suggests 307 that the burnout-depression overlap has been largely underestimated. Atypical depression may account for a substantial part of this overlap. Overall, our findings point to depressive symptoms and depressive disorders as central concerns in the management of burnout. The clinical research on treatments for depression offers solutions that may help workers identified as burned out.

Clinical Psychology Review, 2015

The burnout-depression distinction is conceptually unclear.

Background. The overlap of burnout and depression is important. In this study, a symptom-based analysis of burnout was carried out in reference to the Major Depressive Episode (MDE) diagnosis criteria of the DSM-IV-TR. Methods. MDE symptoms occurrence and severity were compared in burned out workers (BOW; n = 10), clinically depressed outpatients (DEP; n = 11), and healthy individuals (HEA; n = 12) using the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II). One-way (multivariate) ANOVAs and Newman-Keuls tests were run. Findings. Without exception, MDE symptoms were more pronounced in BOW and DEP than in HEA. BOW and DEP exhibited severe depressive symptomatology and undifferentiated BDI-II total scores. Depressed mood, anhedonia, suicidal ideation, vegetative-somatic disturbance, and negative cognition reached similar levels in BOW and DEP. Discussion. Disentangling burnout from depression is difficult both qualitatively and quantitatively. Between-syndrome isomorphism should be further questi...

Frontiers in Public Health, 2021

Job-related distress has been a focal concern in occupational health science. Job-related distress has a well-documented health-damaging and life-threatening character, not to mention its economic cost. In this article, we review recent developments in research on job-related distress and examine ongoing changes in how job-related distress is conceptualized and assessed. By adopting an approach that is theoretically, empirically, and clinically informed, we demonstrate how the construct of burnout and its measures, long favored in research on job-related distress, have proved to be problematic. We underline a new recommendation for addressing job-related distress within the long-established framework of depression research. In so doing, we present the Occupational Depression Inventory, a recently developed instrument devised to assess depressive symptoms that individuals specifically attribute to their work. We close our paper by laying out the advantages of a paradigm shift from bu...

European Psychiatry, 2017

Burnout has in fact been associated with all the ''classical'' symptoms of depression, including the most severe (e.g., anhedonia,

International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health

Objectives: The problem of defining burnout concerns its overlapping effect with other syndromes and disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Additionally, some individual characteristics influence susceptibility to burnout (e.g., neuroticism). Therefore, the question arises whether burnout is or is not a distinct syndrome. The aim of the study is to compare 2 distinct burnout measures by analyzing their connections with organizational and individual variables. Material and Methods: The study was conducted in the Institute of Applied Psychology at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland on a group of employees (N = 100; 40 men; mean age 36.03 years). All participants completed 2 burnout scales: the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) and the Link Burnout Questionnaire (LBQ). Organizational and individual factors were controlled with Areas of Worklife Survey, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, NEO Five-Factor Inventory and Beck's Depression Inventory scales. A structural equation path model was created to quantify the relations between organizational factors and burnout, as well as to control the individual factors of anxiety, neuroticism and depression. Results: The results indicate high compatibility between MBI-GS and LBQ on burnout diagnosis. The MBI-GS and LBQ revealed stronger connections with organizational context and individual characteristics, respectively. Depression explains dimensions of exhaustion (MBI-GS, LBQ), sense of disillusion (LBQ), neuroticism-exhaustion (MBI-GS); anxiety explains sense of professional inefficacy (LBQ). Conclusions: Besides organizational variables, individual characteristics also play an important role in explaining burnout syndrome. Exploring the 2 burnout models has revealed that depression is an important determinant of exhaustion. Cynicism and relationship deterioration have consistently been explained only by organizational context.

Se llama herbolaria al conjunto de conocimientos relacionados con las propiedades curativas de las plantas y desde tiempos remotos, las sociedades indígenas han reconocido y practicado este ancestral conocimiento.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 1991

Subjects watched either an emotional, neutral, or unusual sequence of slides containing 1 critical slide in the middle. Experiments 1 and 2 allowed only a single eye fixation on the critical slide by presenting it for 180 ms (Experiment 1) or 150 ms (Experiment 2). Despite this constraint, memory for a central detail was better for the emotional condition. In Experiment 3, subjects were allowed 2.70 s to view the critical slide while their eye movements were monitored. When subjects who had devoted the same number of fixations were compared, memory for the central detail of the emotional slide was again better. The results suggest that enhanced memory for detail information of an emotional event does not occur solely because more attention is devoted to the emotional information. The purpose of this series of studies was to examine the role of attention and focusing patterns in memory for emotional versus neutral events. We use the term emotional events in this paper to refer to scenes that have unpleasant visual features (e.g., blood) and that have the potential to evoke negative emotional feelings in the viewer. How well are details from such emotional events remembered compared with neutral counterparts? A number of studies have found that central detail information was better retained, while peripheral ! detail information was less well retained from emotional events compared with neutral events (e.g., Christianson, 1984; Christianson & Loftus, 1987, 1991). In the Christianson and Loftus (1991) research, for example, subjects were presented with a thematic series of slides in which the content of one critical slide in the middle of the series was varied. In a neutral condition, this critical slide showed a woman riding a bike. In an emotional condition the woman was seen lying on the ground beside her bike bleeding from a head injury. The results showed that a detail associated with the central woman (the color of the

Designing Patch Dynamics, 2007

In the summer of 2002, Drs. Steward T.A. Pickett, Mary L. Cadenasso, and J. Morgan Grove, scientists from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), approached Brian McGrath at the Urban Design Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) with an innovative cross-disciplinary collaborative opportunity. Funded by the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research Program (LTER), the BES brings together researchers from a variety of social and biophysical science disciplines to engage in data collection, education, and community outreach. Their primary goal is to understand and explain metropolitan Baltimore as a complex ecological system. In an intrepid and prescient next step for BES and LTER, Drs. Pickett, Cadenasso and Grove put forth the radical proposition that the urban designers can help to break new ground in his field of ecology and that current ecosystem science would enliven our own design milieu. This book is the outcome of the first two years of this long term collaboration.