Burnout Essay

Burnout has been seen to be a rising problem not just amongst the mental health service sector but this issue has also raised some flags in the public services systems (Awa, Plaumann, & Walter, 2010). Since burnout was first covered in early 1970s, researches focusing on this complex phenomenon over the past four decades have revealed that burnout occurs cross-culturally and is prevalent across a range of professions such as teachers, managers and secretarial workers, and in a variety of fields like education, business, criminal justice, and computer technology (Leiter & Schaufeli, 1996; Stalker & Harvey, 2002).

Burnout is a response to chronic emotional stress due to those factors, resulting in reduced job productivity, and emotional and/or physical exhaustion. (Perlman & Hartman, 1982). Many studies consider burnout to be a job-related stress condition or even work-related mental health impairment, with the ICD-10 closely tying burnout with the diagnosis of work-related neurasthenia (Awa et al., 2010; Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001; World Health Organization, 1992). Numerous conceptualisation of the burnout phenomenon has been posited but most researchers favour a multidimensional definition developed by Maslach and colleagues (1993; 1996) that encompasses three aspects: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment at work.

Emotional exhaustion deals with the depletion of an individual’s emotional resources, while depersonalisation looks at a negative, cynical and detached approach to people under one’s care and reduced personal accomplishment refers to a reduced sense of self-efficacy and negative feelings towards one's self (Awa et al., 2010). With burnout holding such a extensive reach i...

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...dinal designs. Burnout is a significant issue in mental health, not just for its workers but also for the extensive range of issues for the organisations as well as the clients they serve. There is a pressing call for additional, future development and studies of burnout intervention and prevention programmes, with the scales of burnout levels defined and validated to determine the effectiveness of lowering the levels of burnout to a sub-threshold level. Future programmes should also take the individual-organisational approach since such programmes display high efficacy. Also, while great deal of the studies measure upon the factors based on the individual workers, researchers should also look into the effects on consumers, taking into account that burnout reductions will improve the quality, quantity, and outcomes of services to people with mental health disorders.