Burnout: A Short Socio-Cultural History

1 5 Burnout: A Short Socio-Cultural HistoryWilmar B. SchaufeliThe term burnout wasfirst used in a clinical sense in the early 1970sby Herbert Freudenberger, a practicing American was developed further by the academic researcher and socialpsychologist Christina Maslach, who subsequently developed the mostwidely used questionnaire for assessing burnout. From the beginning,two more or less independent streams of activities can be observed in thefield of burnout studies: (1) a practice-based approach focused onburnout cures, which resulted in the emergence of a veritable burnoutindustry offering workshops, training programmes, counselling, Schaufeli (*)Utrecht University, Utrecht, The NetherlandsKU Leuven, Belgiume-mail: Maslach and Wilmar Schaufeli, Historical and Conceptual Development ofBurnout ,inProfessional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research, , Christina Maslach, and Tadeausz Marek (Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis,1993), pp.

2 1 16. The Author(s) 2017S. Neckel et al. (eds.),Burnout, Fatigue, Exhaustion,DOI , organisational consultancy, and so on; and (2) academicresearch, which produced thousands of scientific publications (75,000according to Google Scholar and 10,000 according to PsychInfo inMarch 2017).Interestingly, there is not much interaction between these few practical burnout intervention measures, for example, havebeen scientifically evaluated; a systematic review of burnout preventionprogrammes identified only 25 studies, of which 14 were randomisedcontrolled a more recent study, Laurentiu Maricu oiu, FlorinSava, and Oana Butta focus onalltypes of burnout interventionprogrammes, rather than restricting themselves to prevention pro-grammes, in their found that a controlled inter-vention was performed in only 6% of the 913 intervention studies theyoriginally identified, and eventually only 47 studies are included in theirmeta-analysis.

3 The results of this meta-analysis show modest but lastingpositive effects of interventions in reducing chapter seeks to explore the historical roots of burnout as wellas the Socio-Cultural factors that led to its emergence. Significantly,burnout did not develop in a historical vacuum; in addition to asubjective experience, it is also a multi-faceted Socio-Cultural pheno-menon. In thefirst part of this chapter, I discuss the academicdiscovery of burnout and why it emerged in thefinal decades ofthe twentieth century. Next, I address the question of how far themajor symptoms of burnout are independent of time and place, andhow they relate to other similar concepts. Have burnout-like phe-nomena been observed in earlier times, and is it a typically Westernphenomenon?

4 And how do the symptoms of burnout and those ofdepression relate to each other? In thefinal section, I discuss differ-ences in the ways the diagnosis is used and understood in NorthAmerica and Awa, Martina Plaumann, and Ulla Walter, Burnout Prevention: A Review ofIntervention Programs ,Patient Education and Counseling78 (2010), 184 Maricu oiu, Florin Sava, and Oana Butta, The Effectiveness of Controlled Interventionson Employees Burnout: A Meta-Analysis ,Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology,89(2016), 1 SchaufeliThe Discovery of BurnoutThe term burnout wasfirst used as an informal, everyday ,Freudenberger borrowed it from the illicit drug scene where it colloqui-ally referred to the devastating effects of chronic drug usedthe term to describe the gradual emotional depletion, loss of motivation,and reduced commitment among volunteers of the St Mark s Free Clinicin New York s East Village, whom he observed as a consulting psycho-logist.

5 Such free clinics for drug addicts and homeless people hadgrown out of the counter- cultural movement, whose protagonists weredissatisfied with the establishment. Not unimportantly, Freudenbergerhimself fell victim to burnout twice, increasing his credibility when spread-ing the message of burnout. His writings on the subject were stronglyautobiographical and his impact is illustrated by the fact that he receivedthe Gold Medal Award of the American Psychological Association, for lifeachievement in the practice of psychology in 1999. Rather than a scholar,Freudenberger was a psychoanalytically trained practitioner who was pri-marily interested in preventing and combatting burnout, rather than inunderstanding and investigating its and simultaneously, Maslach and her colleagues cameacross the same term in California when interviewing a variety of humanservices workers.

6 As a social psychology researcher at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, Maslach was interested in how these workers copedwith emotional arousal while performing their demanding jobs. As a resultof these interviews, she learned that these workers often felt emotionallyexhausted, that they developed negative perceptions and feelings about4 For a more detailed discussion, see Schaufeli and Maslach, Historical and Conceptual Developmentof Burnout , and Wilmar Schaufeli, Michael Leiter, and Christina Maslach, Burnout: 35 Years ofResearch and Practice ,Career Development International14 (2009), 204 Freudenberger, StaffBurnout ,Journal of Social Issues30 (1974), 159 Freudenberger is credited for coining the term burnout, it wasfirst used in a publicationby Bradley (H.)

7 Bradley, Community-Based Treatment for Young Adult Offenders ,Crime andDelinquency15 (1969), 359 70), who described a community-based treatment program for youngoffenders (Enzmann and Kleiber,1989). The term burnout is mentioned in quotation marks onlyonce, when a particular time schedule is discussed that should prevent it from occurring among thestaffthat run the programme. Although no further explanation or description is provided, it illustratesthat the notion of burnout was in the air by the end of the 1960s in the Burnout: A Short Socio-Cultural History107their clients or patients, and that they experienced crises in professionalcompetence as a result of this emotional the self-descriptions of workers symptoms, the practitioners referred to this psy-chological condition as burnout.

8 Maslach and her colleagues subsequentlydeveloped an accessible and easy-to-use self-reporting questionnaire forassessing burnout, which became known as the Maslach BurnoutInventory (MBI).7 This went on to become the most widely used assess-ment tool for , the scientific community deemed burnout a pseudoscienti-fic or fad concept and denounced it as pop psychology , but this soonchanged after the introduction of the MBI, which triggered a wave ofempirical burnout and Donald McGeary documentedan exponential increase in burnout publications starting from themoment the MBI was introduced; from the 1980s to the 1990s, pub-lications increased by 64%, and from the 1990s to the 2000s by 150%.9 Originally, burnout was described and discussed as a phenomenonthat was specific to the human service sector, and especially in healthcare, education, social work, psychotherapy, legal services, and lawenforcement.

9 Indeed, the original version of the MBI couldonlybeemployed in thesefields because of its content and the wording of itsquestions. Until the mid-1990s, when a general version was published,burnout was more or less a phenomenon restricted to the so-calledcaring why was this the case?6 Christina Maslach, Burned-Out ,Human Behavior9 (1976), 16 22, and Christina Maslach, Burnout: A Multidimensional Perspective ,inProfessional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theoryand Research, ed. Wilmar Schaufeli, Christina Maslach, and Tadeusz Marek (Washington, DC:Taylor & Francis, 1993), pp. 19 Maslach and Suzan Jackson, The Measurement of Experienced Burnout ,Journal ofOccupational Behavior2 (1981), 99 and Maslach, Historical and Conceptual Development of Burnout.

10 9 Cindy McGeary and Donald McGeary, Occupational Burnout ,inHandbook of OccupationalHealth and Wellness, ed. Robert Gatchel and Izabella Schultz (New York: Springer, 2012),pp. 181 Schaufeli et al., Maslach Burnout Inventory General Survey ,inThe Maslach BurnoutInventory Test Manual, third ed., ed. , Suzan Jackson, and Michael Leiter(Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1996). SchaufeliWhy Did Burnout Emerge at the Endof the Twentieth Century in the HumanServices Sector?It has been argued that the emergence of the burnout concept is relatedto several broader social, economic, and cultural developments of the1960s in specific developments may have contributedto the emergence of burnout in the human services sector. First, fromthe early 1960s onwards, the War on Poverty in the US led to a largeinflux of idealistically motivated young people into human servicesprofessions.