The Prevalence Of Burnout, By Herbert Freudenberger

Prevalence of Burnout

The term burnout was first coined by Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s, as the state of physical and mental exhaustion caused by stressors on one’s professional life (Freudenberger 2001). He first used this term to describe the effect of harsh stress experiences by “care-giving” and “helping” professionals such as nurses and doctors.

Occupational burnout can be a result of working in high-stress environments and is characterised by reduced efficiency, lack of motivation, frustration at work and general exhaustion (Ruotsalainen 2014). Years later another definition was brought to light. Burnout was defined “as a set of symptoms caused by depersonalisation, emotional exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment that

Stress related burnout can be associated with office politics, lack of social supports, lack of autonomy, being over worked and prolonged periods of difficult work. These factors associated with issues such as the difference between what the employee perceives the job to be and what the job turns out to be, can lead to disengagement and decreased enthusiasm to work thus leading to burnout.

The three components depersonalisation, emotional exhaustion and reduced personal accomplishment levels stated by Maslach, are measured in the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the higher the score, the more likely you are to burnout (Waldman et al. 2009). Burnout has been seen more commonly in health care professionals (Freudenberger 2001). It was found that, Cardiology residents in Argentina who worked more than one job and approximately sixty-four hours a week, displayed high levels of perceived stress, burnout and symptoms of depression (Waldman et al. 2009). Another study on coaches in Lithuania showed that university coaches who had more than ten years of work experience were more likely to burnout than coaches who had less than ten years of work experience (Malinauskas et al. 2010). Both these studies used the effect of perceived stress as a variable that affected