Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Burned-Out With Burnout? Insights From Historical Analysis, Renzo Bianchi, Katarzyna Wac, James Francis Sowden, Irvin Sam Schonfeld
Burned-Out With Burnout? Insights From Historical Analysis, Renzo Bianchi, Katarzyna Wac, James Francis Sowden, Irvin Sam Schonfeld
Publications and Research
Fierce debates surround the conceptualization and measurement of job-related distress in occupational health science. The use of burnout as an index of job-related distress, though commonplace, has increasingly been called into question. In this paper, we first highlight foundational problems that undermine the burnout construct and its legacy measure, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). Next, we report on advances in research on job-related distress that depart from the use of the burnout construct. Tracing the genesis of the burnout construct, we observe that (a) burnout’s definition was preestablished rather than derived from a rigorous research process and (b) the MBI …
Burnout Syndrome And Depression, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent
Burnout Syndrome And Depression, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent
Publications and Research
In this chapter, we proposed an overview of burnout, from the introduction of the construct in the mid-1970s to the growing realization that the syndrome was better conceived of as a depressive condition. Recent studies have shown that the distinction between burnout and depression is problematic, both theoretically and empirically. The history of burnout research suggests that transdisciplinary communication and methodological standards should be strengthened to avoid the proliferation of constructs that, in fact, refer to the same phenomena. Construct proliferation, a transgression of the scientific canon of parsimony, is considered a major problem today because it undermines theory building …
Vital Exhaustion, Burnout, And Other Avatars Of Depression, Bianchi Renzo, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent
Vital Exhaustion, Burnout, And Other Avatars Of Depression, Bianchi Renzo, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent
Publications and Research
In our view, there is a worrying tendency in psychology and medicine to let proliferate “depression-like” constructs—a transgression of the scientific canon of parsimony. The problem is not limited to vital exhaustion (VE). Burnout, a condition akin to VE, has been shown to problematically overlap with depression. Compassion fatigue, a condition that shows particularly blurred definitional contours, is also uncomfortably close to depressive symptomatology. The construct of neurasthenia may be part of this confusing trend as well, although neurasthenia has been elevated to the status of nosological category in the ICD. Construct proliferation jeopardizes knowledge growth by undermining theory building …