Individualizing the burnout problem: Health professionals’ discourses of burnout and recovery in the context of rehabilitation

Abstract

This discourse analytical study explores how health professionals (HPs) construct burnout as a form of mental distress in the context of Finnish burnout rehabilitation framed with a particular rehabilitation ethos. Burnout is a fuzzy concept and lacks a disease status. Therefore, it calls for context-specific definition and justification. By highlighting the socially and interactionally produced character of categories of mental distress, the study investigates the kinds of discourses HPs use to formulate “the problem” and its solutions, and how people dealing with burnout are categorized in these discourses. The data consists of field notes from the observation of group discussion sessions in two 1-year burnout rehabilitation courses. As a result of the analysis, five partly overlapping discourses were identified: psychological, evolutionary, healthy lifestyle, biomedical, and welfare. Within these discourses, people who experience burnout were categorized as over-conscientious employees, “good girls,” “primitive people,” self-responsible rehabilitees, patients, and (aging) employees with social and legal rights. Burnout rehabilitation and HPs’ views reproduce a cultural and clinical discourse around burnout in which work-related problems are treated as individual-level problems and individuals are responsibilized for the management of mental distress. Based on the results, it is concluded that the hybrid type of interventions that attempt to influence both individual- and work-related problems behind burnout would help to prevent people dealing with burnout from being over-responsibilized for solving problems at the workplace.

Beyond the brink: STEM women and resourceful sensemaking after burnout

“…Early studies of burnout recovery have highlighted that its aftershocks engender a complex, protracted, and transformative process (Bernier, 1998; Korhonen et al, 2020; Semeijn, 2019). This has significant implications for individuals' sensemaking processes and subsequent trajectories as suggested by Salminen et al's (2017), p. 7) study of Finnish burnout rehabilitees, where individuals wove “their understanding of the surrounding world into the fabric of their [recovery] narratives.” Similarly, Korhonen and Komulainen's (2021) research on health professionals treating burnout found that work‐related moral discourses surrounding burnout were central to how patients made sense of their recovery. These studies suggest that the period post‐burnout is more than a brief, linear diversion between burnout and recovery; rather, they point to post‐burnout experiences as socially disturbing, complex, and worthy of examination in and of themselves.…”

“…As early studies have suggested, the aftermath of burnout engenders a crisis of meaning that represents a disturbance to the routines and expectations of working life (Bernier, 1998; Korhonen et al, 2020; Salminen et al, 2015, 2017). Significant to this absorbing time of loss is the re‐establishment of meaning, namely, a coherent understanding of work and one's position within the sphere of labor (Korhonen & Komulainen, 2019, 2021). Knowing this, we turn to an approach, which has been used by organizational scholars to uncover how people re‐create meaning during periods of ambiguity, the sensemaking perspective.…”

“…Re‐establishing sensibility after burnout is particularly challenging given its miasmic and undefinable qualities that escape social recognition. This means post‐burnout is a time that is often illegible and insensible to others and, in lieu of a more definitive understanding, has been shown to be vulnerable to moralized discourses around productivity and wellness (Korhonen & Komulainen, 2019, 2021; Salminen et al, 2017). At the same time, being able to narrate one's experience is formative in maintaining a credible social reality and can play a key role in facilitating the possibility of recovery from illness (Conrad & Schneider, 1992; Frank, 1998; Hydén, 1997).…”

“…This has significant implications for individuals' sensemaking processes and subsequent trajectories as suggested by Salminen et al's (2017), p. 7) study of Finnish burnout rehabilitees, where individuals wove "their understanding of the surrounding world into the fabric of their [recovery] narratives." Similarly, Korhonen and Komulainen's (2021) research on health professionals treating burnout found that work-related moral discourses surrounding burnout were central to how patients made sense of their recovery.…”