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What If Burnout Is Actually Depression?
The symptoms can be similar. So how do you know what you’re experiencing?
Every year, dozens of medical leaders and health care administrators travel to Half Moon Bay, California, a beach town 30 miles south of San Francisco, to learn how to help their doctors combat burnout. The Chief Wellness Officer course is part of Stanford’s WellMD Center, an initiative designed to keep stressed-out doctors mentally and physically healthy by promoting evidence-based practices like exercise and mindfulness.
The idea of “burnout” goes back to the 1970s, when American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined the term to explain the consequences of extreme stress in “helping” professions like health care.
Since then, the meaning of “burnout” has evolved. It now applies to more professions than just health care workers and includes more symptoms — for example, “errand paralysis,” as writer Anne Helen Petersen describes her inability to complete mundane tasks. In her viral BuzzFeed article about millennials and burnout, Petersen argues that anyone can get burned out, because it’s the product of a culture that demands people go on working even when their internal resources are depleted.
By definition, burnout is more than just “work stress.” Being burned out can also…
