According to the definition by Gábor Hézser, “burnout is a constant exhaustion which is unable to be terminated in the usual ways by the affected person”.
This phenomenon can appear not only individually, but it can emerge in workplace communities as well, if work requires close cooperation. The joint experience is stress and the possibility of reprocessing is missing.
The burnout syndrome became a field of research in the 70’s contrary to the fact that it was described even in the antiquity, for instance about the apathy of the gladiators experiencing strong stress or in the story introducing the life of Elijah Prophet in the Old Testament, via which the concept of burnout, i.e. the Elijah syndrome can be learnt.
The syndrome includes physical, mental and behavioural symptoms as well, which endanger the physical-mental health and the social relationship network of the individual.
THE PROCESS OF THE FORMATION OF BURNOUT
Stage 1 – Burden of proof
Stage 2 – Increased effort
Stage 3 – Negligence of own demands
Stage 4 – Suppression of demands and conflicts
Stage 5 – Transformation of the values
Stage 6 – Denial of problems
Stage 7 – Recession
Stage 8 – Change of behaviour
Stage 9 – Phenomena of depersonalisation
Stage 10 – Feeling of internal emptiness
Stage 11 – Depression
Stage 12 – Total burnout and exhaustion
The phenomenon of burnout forms slowly and without noticing and it becomes unambiguous usually when changes appear in all levels. Burnout is hard to be identified, as the individual symptoms can be interpreted separately by themselves and it escapes the notice of also the affected person and his/her colleagues, relatives, friends or medical experts that the individual shows the symptoms of burnout. Even if burnout can be identified by others, the affected person is often unable or not willing to accept the feedbacks and the warnings
Hézser Gábor: Miért?, (Why?) Kálvin Kiadó, Budapest (2001), page 89
The process of burnout syndrome can begin even half a year after starting the work and can last usually until five years. Twelve stages are considered, out of which the first three are hard to detect, however, afterwards the symptoms can be seen more and more clearly. The final three stages mean extremely severe physical-mental condition and may become even life threatening.
Appearance of burnout among women in the helper profession
This question may be important regarding the health visitor profession, since this is a profession where almost exclusively women work. It is the question whether the vulnerability of women is higher than that of men and which circumstances are decisive to make women more vulnerable.
International researches show that the vulnerability of women in helper profession is much higher than that of men. The reason of the one above is that women show helper attitude mostly in their private lives as well in addition to their role in their workplaces. If these roles are considered, it becomes clear that private life is often the continuation of the helper profession: as a mother, a wife, a daughter of elder parents, a good neighbour or a friend, the helping-supporting-adapting-empathic operation of our personality switches on. Therefore, one hardly succeeds to get out of her helper role during the whole day.
According to Gábor Hézser, the situation of women in the helper profession can be determined by three characteristic factors:
- Based on social tradition, women are selected to help the children, the old, the sick, i.e. the most deprived people. Women perform their tasks not only due to external expectation, but due to internal devotion as well. These tasks accompany with constant emotional burden. The role of the mistress at home is accompanied with emotional burden, since the members of the family expect understanding, comfort and support.
- In the helper profession, love, solidarity and comfort is expected and necessary, just like home.
- The client-oriented nature of the helper profession complies with the mother-child relationship in the family where it is hard to set the limit and determine where care is enough. The dissatisfaction of the client is often decisive, which means that one tries to provide further care for him/her.
To sum up, the burden of the women performing helper profession is much higher than the women working in other profession or than men working in the helper profession, since they cannot get out of the helping-supporting role in the majority of the day. Therefore, the physical, emotional and conscientious burden is too high.
I would like to emphasise that it is not only the “double” load that may trigger the appearance of burnout, but in general all factors which may be valid for everyone. The most characteristic reasons are among others:
- the extent of efforts cannot be delineated
- the lack of feedback, control and reinforcement
- too low prestige of the profession
- low pay
- regular stress
- excessive feeling of responsibility
- administrative load
- excessive expectations that are hard to meet
- fear, anxiety
- low possibility for career development
- unbalanced relationship with or strong dependence on the similar professions
- frequent changes: control, client retention etc.
The practice saying that there is low emphasis on the reprocessing of difficult situations often appears in the majority of the fields of the helper professions. However, the factors above triggering burnout may be as dangerous as they cannot be disregarded. At the same time, the stress of the events reprocessed during supervision significantly decreases and it prevents the danger of burnout as well. A head nurse working in a hospital recently noted that ”whenever someone dies in the department, we pretend in front of the patients that nothing occurred. We are smiling and doing on our tasks not to trigger any pain. However, each death is painful within, makes a scar and we do not talk about it.”
The prevention of burnout may be reached by the decrease of the effects of the stress factors, by applying three different resources:
- Our social connections
- Our psychological resources, intelligence, skills, knowledge and character
- The fight strategy to defeat stress: emotion-centred coping, i.e. the decrease of the negative emotional condition triggered by the negative stress condition and the problem-centred coping, i.e. the efforts on the annihilation or the avoidance of the stress source.
One of the stress decreasing possibility in the workplaces is the introduction of the supervision group. Not only the reprocessing of a cited event or topic may prevent burnout, but the ability of self-reflection also develops, which goes beyond the supervision process by triggering constant development.
Keep in mind that the helper experts who are highly motivated, enthusiastic and would like to help others more and better, even beyond their own capacity, are usually the ones to go through burnout. Therefore, it is the common interest of the helper profession to support the experts to decrease the harmful effects of difficult situations, to elaborate the appropriate professional competences to avoid stress and to reach professional respect.
LITERATURE
Hézser Gábor: Miért? (Why?), Kálvin Kiadó, Budapest (2001)
Thomas M.H. Bergner: Burn out, Z-press Kiadó, Budapest (2012)