When work hurts (authors Claude de SCORRAILLE, Olivier BROSSEAU, Grégoire VITRY - InterÉditions) tries to answer the question: “How to consider burnout? ". The debate has become a political matter, likely to influence the vote in the next presidential elections.
Here is an excerpt from the book on this hot topic.
Burnout is characterized by a process of exhaustion at work. It is referred to in French as professional exhaustion syndrome, since it is mainly observed in the context of work and manifests itself through a combination of symptoms, the forms of which vary, depending on when find the person engaged in this process. This ranges from signs of overactivity, accompanied or not by intense fatigue, to those of a depressive state, combining deep fatigue, withdrawal from work activity and feeling of professional devaluation, which precedes and above all follows the moment when the person collapses, exhausted.
This procedural dimension sometimes distinguishes the "false burn-out", the one from which one returns after 15 days of work stoppage, from a "real one", where the saturation is such that any return to a professional activity is no longer possible before very long months.
The prospect of burnout is anxiety-provoking for everyone around those who succumb to it: since burnout can affect everyone, even individuals perceived as strong and successful, what will it be for me? And if we cannot change the organization of work, the laws of the market, the very philosophy of work, then, one day or another, each of us can find ourselves the victim of an implacable work situation and collapse. wanting to do too well.
In other words, how do I know if I, too, am so fragile that I risk collapsing? How do I know if I am not the victim of a toxic context?
This is the meaning of the current questions that irrigate the reflection of the National Assembly's social affairs commission, which is hearing [1] key players in the sector to give a recommendation aimed at validating or not the qualification of burn-out/syndrome. professional exhaustion in occupational disease; which the Assembly ruled out for the first time in 2014.
This question is not insignificant in the more general context of reflection on the protection of mental health at work. A possible recognition of burnout as an occupational disease could complement and accentuate victimization, and therefore the judicialization of the world of work. It inspires us with the following questions: - How to cure the newly recognized disease? - Who to treat? - At what stage of the process?
