Most people do not attribute their burnout symptoms to work, 2025, Schonfeld et al

rvallee

rvallee

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Most people do not attribute their burnout symptoms to work

Highlights
• Only a minority of participants attribute their burnout symptoms to work.
• Burnout is not attributed to work more often than general conditions are.
• Job variables show intricate links to burnout and general conditions.
• Burnout does not stand out as a condition primarily or specifically related to work.

A prevailing belief among researchers is that burnout is a work-specific syndrome induced by intractable job stress. The validity of this belief, however, remains unclear. This cross-sectional study compared burnout with two general conditions, nonspecific psychological distress (NSPD) and exhaustion, in terms of (a) causal attributions to work and (b) associations with 11 job variables (e.g., job satisfaction).

The study involved 813 individuals employed in Norway (70.5 % female). Burnout was assessed with the Burnout Assessment Tool; NSPD, with the K6; and exhaustion, with the Karolinska Exhaustion Disorder Scale. Results showed that only 27.7 % of participants with burnout symptoms attributed these symptoms to work. The proportions of individuals ascribing their symptoms to work were similar for NSPD (26.9 %) and exhaustion (27.5 %). The higher one's burnout score, the higher the likelihood of attributing one's burnout, NSPD, and exhaustion symptoms to work.

Overall, burnout shared more variance with job variables than did NSPD and exhaustion. Coworker support, job security, and job autonomy constituted notable exceptions. In multiple regression analyses, seven of the 11 job variables predicted NSPD; five predicted burnout and exhaustion. An a posteriori analysis of a nationally balanced quota sample of 591 U.S. employees (48.2 % female) replicated our main finding—only 35.9 % of participants attributed their burnout symptoms to work. This study invites stakeholders to exercise more caution when making etiological inferences about burnout. Assuming that symptoms experienced at work are necessarily caused by work may hinder our ability to mitigate these symptoms. Our findings further question work-centric views of burnout.
 
Randomly saw an article about it this week, although it's from 2024. From our friends at the Journal of psychosomatic research, The opening sentence is a bit silly since that belief exists only because burnout has been asserted to essentially be either/or overwork, or being unhappy at work. It's pretty much how it's defined. I guess they never bothered to check. Then again, they may have and decided that it didn't matter anyway.

I don't think much of their alternative interpretation, it's all very hand-wavy and about as silly as the old deconditioning tropes, where just because deconditioning is not significant, doesn't mean it's not relevant, or whatever.

I'm not sure how closely related it is to the Swedish-only concept of Exhaustion disorder, which explicitly includes ME/CFS, but I'd say it's pretty fair to say it very much is:
Burnout was assessed with the Burnout Assessment Tool; NSPD, with the K6; and exhaustion, with the Karolinska Exhaustion Disorder Scale
Click to expand...
And speaking of Exhaustion disorder, here's a recent study from Sweden with many quotes from physicians who pretty much admit that the whole concept is entirely useless, and that none of the preferred treatments, which are all some form of CBT with various attempts at motivating to be happy, or whatever, work at all: https://www.s4me.info/threads/physicians’-experiences-of-assessing-and-supporting-fatigued-patients-in-primary-care-a-focus-group-study-2025-samuelsson.44615/.
 
The challenge is first to identify a condition that you don't know how to test you first have to group people by symptoms and apparently how they started to suffer the condition and then come up with a working clinical identification to conduct research on a patient group. The problem is usually the jump straight to CBT and exercise as the solution to the condition. Unless something is really obvious like ebola or similar where we have clear physical symptoms that we can see I don't really see another way to start to identify the patient group to then start looking into what differs biologically. Its all the presumptions its the patients fault and mental illness that is the issue not necessarily the questionaries. But at some point once you have a group then the biology work needs to start and every time these psychology groups seem to delay the proper research from beginning.
 
I don't understand because burnout is defined as being work-related. The WHO states:
Burn-out is defined in ICD-11 as follows:

“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

  • feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
  • increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
  • reduced professional efficacy.
Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
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Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases

Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is not classified as a medical condition.It is described in the chapter: ‘Factors influencing health status or contact with health services’ – which includes...
www.who.int www.who.int

So this mainly shows that the authors of this study did not understand the concept of burnout or perhaps would like to change it so that they can apply it to other contexts?
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
I don't understand because burnout is defined as being work-related. The WHO states:

Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases

Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is not classified as a medical condition.It is described in the chapter: ‘Factors influencing health status or contact with health services’ – which includes...
www.who.int www.who.int

So this mainly shows that the authors of this study did not understand the concept of burnout or perhaps would like to change it so that they can apply it to other contexts?
Click to expand...
But it's not about burnout itself, rather than burnout symptoms and whether those can be attributed to work. Note that all people in the study are still working and I don't know if any of them have actually been diagnosed with burnout, which might tell us a lot more. But of course someone with an autoimmune disease, cancer or depression can have burnout symptoms that are not attributed to work in any way. Another study for example suggested that people with burnout symptoms describe their symptoms as being work related as often as people with depression. In my head that reads similar to what is seen elsewhere: Simply counting symptoms is meaningless.

I don't know why anybody would receive a diagnosis of burnout if they don't describe their symptoms to be work related but I also wouldn't be surprised if doctors sometimes hand out the diagnosis when they don't know what else might be happening and want to get rid of the patient.
 
EndME said:
but I also wouldn't be surprised if doctors sometimes hand out the diagnosis when they don't know what else might be happening and want to get rid of the patient.
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Or just pass them off to a specialist for a while.
 
I know my mum was misdiagnosed as burnout for a while, (she has some sort of chronic illness, settled with hEDS label but it fits mild ME criteria)
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
I don't understand because burnout is defined as being work-related. The WHO states:

Burn-out an "occupational phenomenon": International Classification of Diseases

Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is not classified as a medical condition.It is described in the chapter: ‘Factors influencing health status or contact with health services’ – which includes...
www.who.int www.who.int

So this mainly shows that the authors of this study did not understand the concept of burnout or perhaps would like to change it so that they can apply it to other contexts?
Click to expand...
Burnout seems to basically be "chronic fatigue", but someone decided that it could be blamed on some vague work-related 'stress', especially when people report no depression.

It mostly shows that the concept is arbitrary, was defined to be about work, but when people labeled with burnout are asked, they don't agree. Which isn't surprising, vague categories pulled out of the air to satisfy some "biopsychosocial" need to explain them in ways that have nothing to do with what the patients have reported.

There seems to be some overlap, through some of the researchers and the use of a questionnaire for it, with Sweden's "exhaustion syndrome". It's all made up, but they can't accept that, so just shuffle stuff around some more, since clearly no one actually expects anything out of it.

Writing diagnostic labels on cards, throwing them down stairs then picking the ones that fell on stairs numbered as decided by hopscotching likely produces similar results.

hopsco_noun_002_18145.jpg
 
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