Word: burnouts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...biggest difficulties with the concept of burnout is that it has become faddish and indiscriminate, an item of psychobabble, the psychic equivalent, in its ubiquitousness, of jogging. Burnout has no formal psychiatric status. Many psychoanalysts regard the malady as simply that old familiar ache, depression. Even so, plenty of professionals take burnout seriously. Psychological journals are heavy with analyses of burnout...
...Burnout is progressive, occurring over a period of time. Authors Robert Veninga and James Spradley define five stages that lead from a stressful job to a burnt-out case: 1) The Honeymoon-intense enthusiasm and job satisfaction that, for all but a few dynamos, eventually give way to a time when valuable energy reserves begin to drain off. 2) Fuel Shortage-fatigue, sleep disturbances, possibly some escapist drinking or shopping binges and other early-warning signals. 3) Chronic Symptoms-exhaustion, physical illness, acute anger and depression. 4) Crisis-illness that may become incapacitating, deep pessimism, self-doubt, obsession with...
...Burnout may be the late 20th century descendant of neurasthenia and the nervous breakdown-the wonderfully matter-of-fact all-purpose periodic collapse that our parents were fond of. Burnout is preeminently the disease of the thwarted; it is a frustration so profound that it exhausts body and morale. Burnout, in advanced states, imposes a fatigue that seems-at the time-a close relative of death. It is the entropy of the other-directed. Even the best worker-especially the best worker-will often, when thwarted, swallow his rage; it then turns into a small private conflagration, the fire...
...burnout, for all its serious implications, somewhat irritating to contemplate? Part of the problem resides in the term itself. It is too apocalyptic (in its private, individual way). Burnout implies a violent process ending in a devastation. The term perfectly captures an American habit of hyperbole and narcissism working in tandem: a hypochondria of the spirit. The idea contains a sneaking self-aggrandizement tied to an elusive self-exoneration. In the concept of burnout, there is no sense of human process, of the ups and downs-even the really awful downs-to which all men and women, in all history...
...Burnout has a way of turning the sovereign self (as we thought of it once, long ago) into a victim, submissive, but passive-aggressive, as psychologists say; it is like a declaration of bankruptcy-necessary sometimes, but also somewhat irresponsible and undignified. It is a million-dollar wound, an excuse, a ticket out. The era of "grace under pressure" vanished in the early '60s. Burnout is the perfect disorder for an age that lives to some extent under the Doctrine of Discontinuous Selves. It simply declares one's self to be defunct, out of business; from that pile...