Getting out of burnout - General aspects
To approach burnout, we will try to circumscribe its contours; We
are not going to present typical profiles to you but rather to tell you about the mechanics of
regulation.
We can already rely on the image we have of it: burnout is a form of
carbonization.
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The first to have spoken of it in this way is Herbert Freudenberger, psychiatrist
New Yorker, specialist in the treatment of drug addicts who, trying to describe their condition
interior, will use the term "depletion"; they are literally "scorched". He resumed
this term on his own account, concerning him in the exercise of his profession, by evoking the
resources it must deploy to help them.
He therefore defines burnout as a depletion of an individual's internal resources,
the reduction of his energy, his vitality, his interest.... Burnout would result from a
sum of sustained efforts to achieve an unattainable objective, within a framework of
This definition initially applies to all professions where the help, under
one form or another, is preponderant.
In French, the original term would be acédit, a word which comes from the Greek, and which means
indifference born of an excess of fervor, which by dint of being excessive, becomes lukewarm.
Originally applied in the monastic sphere, acedit is akin to an "overheating
of fervor" leading to create doubt.
A more positive vision of English origin leads us to the following definition: it
it would be a rebirth at the end of a dysfunctional process. Observed in
leprosy, it would be a state resulting from the cessation of the disease after confinement, the outbreak
of infection disappearing through exhaustion and moving on to something new, a
metamorphosis.
What can be said more generally is that any attempt at a solution
dysfunctional leads to exhaustion.
Burnout is an addiction to action; the engine is the feeling of omnipotence
that he gives and who "does so much good" at the moment but who tires so much.
This phenomenon is obviously encouraged today by the pace of work imposed
to employees as well as pressure on results.
