Moreover, the organizational environments for these jobs are shaped by various social, political, and economic factors (such as funding cutbacks or policy restrictions) that result in work settings that are high in demands and low in resources. Within such occupations, the prevailing norms are to be selfless and put others' needs first to work long hours and do whatever it takes to help a client or patient or student to go the extra mile and to give one's all. Although such relationships can be rewarding and engaging, they can also be quite stressful. The therapeutic or service relationships that such providers develop with recipients require an ongoing and intense level of personal, emotional contact. Given that the treatment goal for burnout is usually to enable people to return to their job, and to be successful in their work, psychiatry could make an important contribution by identifying the treatment strategies that would be most effective in achieving that goal.įor many years, burnout has been recognized as an occupational hazard for various people‐oriented professions, such as human services, education, and health care.
Current issues of particular relevance for psychiatry include the links between burnout and mental illness, the attempts to redefine burnout as simply exhaustion, and the relative dearth of evaluative research on potential interventions to treat and/or prevent burnout. But it has also identified some of the unique stressors that mental health professionals face when they are dealing with especially difficult or violent clients. Research on the burnout experience for psychiatrists mirrors much of the broader literature, in terms of both sources and outcomes of burnout. The majority of this work has focused on human service occupations, and particularly health care.
Measures have been developed, as have various theoretical models, and research studies from many countries have contributed to a better understanding of the causes and consequences of this occupationally‐specific dysphoria. The experience of burnout has been the focus of much research during the past few decades.