Author Archives: agnieszkamajor
There is always something you can do…
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How to differentiate burnout from depression and acute stress
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HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE BURNOUT FROM DEPRESSION
Burnout and depression can look very similar. Both are often characterised by feelings of fatigue and low energy, sleep disturbances, feeling sad and distressed. But unlike burnout, depression is a psychiatric diagnosis with symptoms which have a global impact – not limited to occupational context. Depression is potentially a severely debilitating condition, affecting many areas of the person’s life. Continue reading
Burnout phases and consequences
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Burnout is a process that develops in stages over several weeks or months – even years. One of the best-known multi-stage models was developed by a psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who was also the first to describe the term „burnout“ in 1974 as „a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by one’s professional life”, “a desease of over-commitment”. At each of burnout phases, different physiological and psychological symptoms and consequences are described.
Burnout causes related to work, lifestyle and personality type
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In most cases, burnout causes relates to our working life. However, anyone who feels overworked and undervalued for a long time is at risk for burnout — from the hard-working manager who hasn’t had a holiday in a long time, to a stay at home mother looking after her two children and an aging mother. There are, however, other factors than only these job-related which contribute to burnout, including lifestyle and certain personality characteristics. Continue reading
Burnout definition
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Work-related stress is one of the biggest health and safety challenges that we face in Europe, with one in four workers affected.
Between 50% – 60% of all lost working days are related to excessive work stress and the annual economic cost in the EU is estimated at 20 billion Euros. Continue reading
Burnout symptoms through stages
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Burnout is a gradual process that progresses over an extended period of time. If you’re not paying attention to some subtle – at first! – warning signals, they get worse and worse as time goes on.
The early burnout symptoms suggest that something is wrong that needs to be addressed. If you respond to this warning, you can prevent a major breakdown. If you ignore them, you’ll eventually burn out. Continue reading
Frequently Asked Questions on Burnout FAQ
We collected and answered the most common questions and presented them in “Burnout FAQ“. We hope it will make the phenomenon more clear and understandable.
1) Is burnout a mental disease or not?
It is not a mental disorder in the clinical sense (ICD -10) but a set of different physical and psychological symptoms that arise and it is important to perform a correct diagnosis (category Z73.0, the chronic fatigue syndrome or burnout syndrome).
2) Is burnout a personality disorder?
It is not a personality disorder (like neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, paranoia). It is a pathological behaviour modification which arises when specific and strong stress conditions affect the person. Continue reading
Patricia (age 34)
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Case study no. 9: Patricia (age 34), Lawyer
Patricia is a 34 year old lawyer and worked hard whilst raising her son and keeping a fairly busy social life. Recently, she started feeling down and exhausted when at work. Every day she left her job dreading coming back. She felt like all the tasks were weighing on her and she couldn’t see an end of her ‘to do lists’. Her colleagues irritated her and her emails sounded angrier than she’d like to let on. She couldn’t help but comfort-eat. This didn’t help as it only fuelled her anxieties about her body weight. In addition, she began suffering from tension headaches and couldn’t fall asleep as she was feeling restless.
Convinced that this was depression she asked her GP for antidepressants. When her doctor found out that Patricia was a happy mother and never lost interest in her social or family life, he asked more questions about her job. Patricia confessed that she felt very frustrated about the fact that despite all the hard work she put in her job, she wasn’t getting any closer to her desired promotion. It felt like everybody else ‘was getting there’ whilst she was ‘stuck’. She felt like a failure. She thought that she was personally targeted by the boss. Her GP advised her to try counselling to see how the failed expectations affected her emotional well-being and what coping strategies she could use to make the situation better.
The counsellor helped Patricia to examine her personal goals and possible different career paths. He worked with her on her assertiveness skills to help her approach her boss and colleagues in a way which would allow her to achieve her goals without causing unnecessary tensions. Patricia also found it helpful to learn some tips about how to de-stress and take care of herself outside of work.
Yasmine (age 52)
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Case study no. 7: Yasmine (age 52), Teacher
She is a teacher in a primary school in Rome. She started this job at the end of Nineties with a great enthusiasm and in her first school she was very glad, then she moved to another school, closer to her home but in a more disadvantaged area; after a good start she asked for a part-time position and the troubles arose.
She felt herself marginalised both from the pupils (few hours with them, negative inputs on the didactic) and from her colleagues (less information, less frequent relationships). This confused and unpleasant situation was very stressing to Mrs Cox.
Mrs Cox is also very sociable, but started to avoid friends and relatives, to stay at home during the weekends, to be very irritable, to sleep badly, and to be inattentive. She started a cycle of meetings with a psychotherapist after the suggestion of a colleague and now she has a satisfactory relationship within the school environment and has regained her smile and the social interests.