Examining the Mental Health Status of Hungarian Teachers

Abstract

Research on burnout examines the phenomenon from an individual, interpersonal, and organizational perspective. The individual approach focuses on the examination of personality, with particular regard to personality traits predisposing to the burnout syndrome, as well as the symptoms of burnout appearing at the individual level. The interpersonal aspects refer to the social environment, the relationship between the helping professional and his client. Research on the organizational level emphasizes the particularities of the given workplace, job title, and the organization. Examining the causes of the burnout syndrome, Pines, Aronson, Kafry (1990) revealed three reasons for burnout based on their research with 4,000 people: emotional overload, client-centered orientation and certain personality traits. As a result of these findings, in our research we investigated the psychological immune competence of teachers, because they can be regarded as a particularly vulnerable group, and psychological immune competence is a good coping resource (Vargay et al., 2019). We analyzed the mental health status of teachers (N: 301) from individual and interpersonal aspects in 2022, in Hungary. Based on our results, among the 16 factors of the Psychological Immune Competence Test , they achieved the weakest result in the field of emotional control. We measured weaker results in the areas of challenge/flexibility, inhibition of irritability and social creativity, too. However, their results in the field of sense of coherence and endurance are better. In the mobilizing-creating-executive subsystem, they achieved a much higher value than the standardized average (for Hungarians). In the self-regulating and approach-monitoring subsystems, the results of teachers are similar to the standard average. 92% of the teachers have a positive mindset, but 40% achieved poor results in terms of challenge/flexibility. In the field of emotional control, 20% of them have below average results, which can lead to burnout later. Our results show that among teachers, psychoeducational training can play an important role in preventing psychosomatic illnesses and burnout. Our long-term goal is to device targeted trainings for Hungarian teachers to prevent and alleviate burnout.