Burnout

Freudenberger published "Staff Burn-Out" in the Journal of Social Issues in 1974, the first clinical description of the phenomenon. He defined burnout as a state of exhaustion caused by excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources, observed specifically among people in caregiving professions. The metaphor is thermal. Something that burns out has consumed its own fuel, not because it was deficient, but because it gave everything it had.

Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the concept further. In 1981, she published the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which remains the most widely used instrument for measuring burnout. Maslach identified three dimensions of the condition: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Her framework moved burnout from a clinical observation into a measurable, researchable phenomenon.

Freudenberger published a book in 1980 titled Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement, which brought the concept to a mass audience. He appeared on television programs and received hundreds of letters from doctors, nurses, teachers, and housewives who recognized themselves in the description. The word entered the cultural vocabulary so rapidly that by the 2000s, researchers had published over fifteen thousand scientific papers on the subject.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), classifying it as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. The WHO specified three symptoms: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job, and reduced professional efficacy. It is not classified as a medical condition.