Burnout through the Lenses of Equity/Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Disabled People: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Burnout is a problem within the workplace including in higher education, the activity of activism, and in reaction to experiencing systemic discrimination in daily life. Disabled people face problems in all of these areas and therefore are in danger of experiencing “disability burnout”/”disablism burnout”. Equity/equality, diversity, and inclusion” (EDI) linked actions are employed to improve the workplace, especially for marginalized groups including disabled people. How burnout is discussed and what burnout data is generated in the academic literature in relation to EDI and disabled people influences burnout policies, education, and research related to EDI and to disabled people. Therefore, we performed a scoping review study of academic abstracts employing SCOPUS, the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST and Web of Science with the aim to obtain a better understanding of the academic coverage of burnout concerning disabled people and EDI. We found only 14 relevant abstracts when searching for 12 EDI phrases and five EDI policy frameworks. Within the 764 abstracts covering burnout and different disability terms, a biased coverage around disabled people was evident with disabled people being mostly mentioned as the cause of burnout experienced by others. Only 30 abstracts covered the burnout of disabled people, with eight using the term “autistic burnout”. Disabled activists’ burnout was not covered. No abstract contained the phrase “disability burnout”, but seven relevant hits were obtained using full-text searches of Google Scholar. Our findings suggest that important data is missing to guide evidence-based decision making around burnout and EDI and burnout of disabled people.

Occupational Concepts: An Underutilized Resource to Further Disabled People and Others Being Occupied: A Scoping Review

“…Activities of daily living such as leisure also encounter EDI issues [129]. Furthermore, problems marginalized groups experience in their occupation of daily activities due to systemic discrimination [111,113] could be used to feed into the EDI activities at the workplace.…”

“…38". [112] (p. 180) cited in [113] The systemic disablism faced by disabled people in occupational endeavors could be critiqued using the occupational concepts that do not focus on the disabled person being the problem, such as occupational rights, apartheid, justice, injustice and deprivation to name a few. We suggest that these concepts would be of use to disability studies scholars [168,169], scholars that investigate the social aspects of being occupied in general and disability rights activists and their allies that want to spotlight the occupational injustice disabled people face in general.…”

“…Many of the social realities depicted by the occupational terms we covered could be seen to have, as one consequence, the burnout of people at work [70,113] but also in general such as life burnout [113]. For example, occupational marginalization is described as the lack of opportunity to participate in desired daily activities based on the normative standardization of expectations [28].…”

“…It is argued that environmental activism impacts disabled people in the following four main ways: "(a) potential arguments (preventing impairment) for environmental actions; (b) changing societal parameters caused by environmental activism; (c) changing societal parameters demanded by environmental activism and (d) technologies used as a solution for environmental issues (e.g., geoengineering and human enhancement to make humans resistant to climate change)". [273] (p. 3) It is, furthermore, noted in the literature that disabled people face barriers to the occupation of being environmental activists [273][274][275][276][277][278], with a high danger of activist burnout [113,279]. However, our searches resulted in few to no hits for various environmentlinked concepts with the occupational concepts we used for our searches.…”

Disproportionately High Rates of Burnout Among Disabled Caregivers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…While people initially used burnout to talk about labor issues, it has remained part of the broader public discourse on stress and exhaustion, and has been frequently used in recent years to describe the impact of COVID-19 on mental health [2][3][4]. Within the context of scholarly research, burnout has been used to understand people's experiences with work, caregiving, disability, and more [5][6][7]. Burnout has been associated with factors such as lower levels of education, lower socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic marginalization, and lack of community and structural support [7,[8][9][10][11].…”