Examining the evidence base for burnout
Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld
Abstract
Burnout has elicited growing interest among occupational health specialists in recent decades. Since 2019, the World Health Organization has characterized burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic, unmanageable workplace stress. According to the ICD-11, three symptoms define the entity: feelings of exhaustion, increased mental distance from one’s job, and a sense of ineffectiveness at work, all of which correspond to the structure of the Maslach Burnout Inventory. The ICD-11 includes burnout among the factors that influence health status. This paper calls into question that conceptualization based on a number of lines of evidence. The evidence includes the following: burnout was predefined before systematic, replicable research on the construct was conducted; the symptom picture is clinically and theoretically ill-founded; and because of the high correlation of the exhaustion core of burnout with depressive symptoms, the burnout label can mask a serious depressive condition.