Burnt out: making time for relaxation this summer

As summer arrives and the days grow warmer, many of us will look forward to a summer holiday, whether at home or abroad. However, many healthcare professionals suffer from burnout, which prevents them from switching off, or makes them feel as if they can't afford to take time off at all. Burnout is a syndrome characterised by emotional exhaustion that results in depersonalisation and decreased personal accomplishment at work. It occurs when emotionally exhausted healthcare professionals become overwhelmed by work to the point of feeling fatigued, unable to face the demands of their role, and unable to engage with others (Lyndon, 2016). Burnout is a problem in many sectors of medicine, owing to the pressures of handling many patients and a heavy and highly critical workload.

Many of us think of burnout as a contemporary phenomenon, brought about by our fast-paced lifestyles and the information overload we experience courtesy of the media, both mainstream and social. However, Anna Katharina Schaffner, literary critic and medical historian at the University of Kent, claims that historical evidence suggests that this may not be the case. During her extensive research, Schaffner found that people have been suffering from extreme fatigue for centuries (Schaffner, 2016). Around the time of the birth of modern medicine, doctors began to diagnose the symptoms of fatigue as ‘neurasthenia,’ believing that these symptoms were a result of weak nerves allowing for the dissipation of energy. Intellectual figures such as Oscar Wilde, Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf were all diagnosed with neurasthenia. Interestingly enough, doctors of the time blamed it on the social changes of the idustrial revolution, just as many people today attribute burnout to our own rapidly-changing society.