Via Eugen, a nice piece on a topic we discuss every so often.
Udhay
http://www.nymag.com/news/features/24757
Cant Get No Satisfaction
In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith.
* By Jennifer Senior
People who are suffering from burnout tend to
describe the sensation in metaphors of
emptinesstheyre a dry teapot over a high flame,
a drained battery that can no longer hold its
charge. Thirteen years, three books, and dozens
of papers into his profession, Barry Farber, a
professor at Columbia Teachers College and
trained psychotherapist, realized he was feeling
this way. Unfortunately, he was well acquainted
with the symptoms. He was a burnout researcher himself.
Being burned out on burnoutnow that was rich.
Madame Curie died of radiation poisoning; Joseph
Mitchell famously developed a 32-year-long case
of writers block after writing a two-part New
Yorker series about a blocked writer; now Farber
was suffering the same self-referential fate. He
jokes about it today (who wouldnt?) but hardly
felt sanguine as it was happening (who would?).
Colleagues tried to persuade him to stick it out.
But for the most part, Ive resisted coming
back, says Farber. Ive never been able to find
that same sense of satisfaction.
Farber had burned out once before. Back in the
late sixties and early seventies, he taught
public school in East Harlem. Hed wanted to help
people, do the world some good. Yet for four
years hed struggled to stop his students from
fighting with one another, and in spite of his
best efforts he couldnt even teach all of them
to read. His classroom became a perverse
experiment in physics, with energy never
conserved (input always exceeded output), and he,
a teacher in perpetual motion, always craving
rest. Eventually, he began to pull away from his
studentsdepersonalization, as the literature now
calls itjustifying his seeming insensitivity by
telling himself he wasnt making a difference
anyway. It was only when Farber went to graduate
school at Yale that he learned that this syndrome
had a name: Burnout. The concept offered a
perfect understanding of what teachers were
feeling, he recalls. It wasnt in fact that
they were racist and mercenary and noncaring but
that their level of caring couldnt be sustained in the absence of results.
Farber was so captivated by the notion of burnout
he made it the subject of his dissertation. And
he stayed with it for another thirteen years.
Until the day he couldnt anymore. He still
remembers the breaking point. Hed just completed
a book about burnout among teachers, a subject
hed once considered exceptionally urgent. Yet
even as I was writing, he says, I had this
sense that I really wanted to finish it so that I
could go on to something else. I felt somewhat
bored, and somewhat depleted. Id said all I
wanted to say. He ponders this point. I guess,
he says, I lost the sense that it was important.
I cant quite say that Ive ever had the full-on
Farber experience. But Ive certainly had
mini-versions of it. Whenever Ive finished a big
project, for instance, or whenever Ive found
myself listening to the 10 p.m. whir of the
vacuum cleaners in our office start up for the
tenth night in a row, theres no one I identify
with more than the Bill Murray character in
Rushmore, particularly as hes blankly tossing
golf balls from a wire basket into his swimming
pool. Its not that I dont love my work. But
hold a stethoscope to my brain, eavesdrop on my
innermost thoughts, and at those moments, all
youll hear is the sound of a whistling conch shell.
Burnout is not its own category in the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Its
not something that can be treated
pharmacologically; it is not considered the same
thing as depression or a midlife crisis, though
sometimes they coincide. The term was first
coined by a psychotherapist named Herbert
Freudenberger, who himself probably took it from
Graham Greenes novel A Burnt-Out Case. (I
havent enough feeling left for human beings,
the books numb protagonist, Querry, wrote in his
journal, to do anything for them out of pity.)
While working at a free clinic for drug addicts
in Haight-Ashbury, Freudenberger noticed that the
volunteers, when discouraged, would often push
harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as
if they were achieving less and less. The result,
in 1974, was the book Burnout: The High Cost of
High Achievement. Others soon followed. A subspecialty of psychology was born.
Back in the seventies, when people marched into
the world with convictions about changing it,
burnout was considered a noble affliction. It
meant that youd depleted yourself while helping
others. Almost all the research thatd been done
on the subject, and thered been quite a lot, was
on the people in the caring professionsnurses,
public-school teacher
