Michael West
Short Biography...
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What is burnout?
So burnout is basically people being exhausted by their work being so under pressure that they become depleted in terms of their emotional resources, in terms of feeling good about themselves at work and in their ability to bring energy and dedication to their work. It's people feeling exhausted and tired of feeling exhausted in their work.
What are the main symptoms of burnout?
So the main symptoms of burnout are first people feeling emotionally exhausted, just kind of worn out, just emotionally drained. And secondly, it's a feeling of maybe a bit of cynicism, not feeling that the people we interact with at work, maybe people we provide care for, or children we're educating in schools or people we're providing services for, or people we're serving in a shop, that we stop seeing them as individual, unique human beings. The term is depersonalization. And third is a feeling of just feeling like we're not effective in our work, that we're not merely making a great difference, that we're not somehow being really competent and making a contribution. And altogether it adds up to just a feeling of kind of exhaustion and emptiness and pain.
How is burnout diagnosed?
So the way typically that burnout is diagnosed is either through using a questionnaire, asking people some standard questions on a survey instrument, and there are a number of them, but probably the most famous is one called the Maslak Burnout Inventory, which asks people to respond to a series of questions about the extent to which they feel emotionally exhausted, the extent to which they feel cynical and fed up in their work, the extent to which they feel effective in their work. And that kind of gives an indication of whether or not people may be burned out. Another approach is to have an interview with a therapist, with a professional, with a practitioner helping professional, where they ask a series of questions about the nature of our experience, what we're going through, what the difficulties are as a way of diagnosing whether we're burned out.