Burnout - A Cultural Phenomena?
I’m going to start with a brief disclaimer. It’s very hard to ‘have’ something which you don’t have a name for and it makes it even harder when you’re not sure if you believe in this thing. This is how my story of burnout starts…
I (now) believe a burnout really is cultural, here are a few things about myself to set the scene. I’m part Sri Lankan, part English, was born in Sweden and have lived in Spain, India and more. I have now been living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands for 8 years. I am my own boss, and work as a DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging) trainer, speaker and facilitator. Having previously worked in the corporate sector, the Netherlands has the best labour laws I’ve ever encountered. I speak from personal experience, so please remember to take what resonates for you and leave the rest!
What is a burnout?
Let’s begin with a definition by the man who popularised the term ‘burnout’ in 1974 Herbert Freudenberger.
“Becoming exhausted by making excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources” in the workplace (Freudenberger, 1974, p. 159). According to Freudenberger, burnout is characterised by physical symptoms such as exhaustion, fatigue, frequent headaches and gastrointestinal disorders, sleeplessness, and shortness of breath. Behavioral signs include frustration, anger, a suspicious attitude, a feeling of omnipotence or overconfidence, cynicism, and signs of depression.
Freudenberger not only described the symptoms of burnout but also listed personality factors that predispose people to suffer from burnout. It is primarily “the dedicated and the committed” who are most likely to burn out (Freudenberger, 1974, p. 161).
Okay, so far I’m following. But I have to admit I couldn’t see the signs of burnout in myself. I thought stress is normal and I can keep going until I go on holiday, back to Sri Lanka. Oh how wrong I was! I consider myself hugely privileged to be have been living in the Netherlands when my Manager recongnised many of the symptoms of burnout and put me on sick leave straight away.
It was only after this “diagnosis“ that I truly let myself stop. I have since learnt that burnout is caused by fatigue that comes from carrying too much for too long and my brain felt truly fried. I was doing very strange things (out of character for me), like getting the Metro home in the wrong direction and booking flights to the wrong destination, on the wrong day, and on the wrong airline (more than once).
On a personal level I felt that I had ‘no right to burnout’ as objectively I had a good job, living situation and people around me. Of course, I now understand that trying to relativise mental health problems is futile, but if I’m going to be completely honest here - I felt guilty for burning out. I started this piece by saying that I didn’t believe in burnout and while that may seem an ignorant statement to half the world, outside of Europe I don’t think it would be.
Is burnout a Western phenomenon?
Since my burnout 4 yrars ago, I have tried to understand if a burnout is a Western phenomena. After its emergence in the US in the 1970s the concept of burnout spread to Western Europe and from the mid-1990s onwards, burnout was also observed in the rest of Western, Middle-, and Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. After the turn of the last century, research on burnout also spread to Africa, China, and to the Indian subcontinent. Very generally speaking, the order in which the recognition of burnout seems to have spread corresponds to the socio- economic development of the countries involved.
This discovery then led me down a path of trying to understand how much research had been done on burnout and culture and I found the fact that virtually no investigation has been carried out that takes cultural differences into account - puzzling.
Netherlands and Sri Lanka
So naturally I did what any good sociologist would try and do and (unscientifically) compared what I know: the Netherlands and Sri Lanka. The Netherlands is one the very few countries in the world that treats burnout as a medical diagnosis. In the Netherlands you are eligible for financial compensation in terms of sick leave when you’re officially diagnosed by a medical professional, and employers are obliged by law to have a company doctor to do so. Thus medical practitioners act as a gatekeeper. One possible reason I found for the Netherlands being so far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of this is that, since the 1950s Dutch physicians have been using ‘overstrain’ (overspannenheid) as an official diagnostic label, although it was not restricted to the work context. When burnout was introduced it was used to indicate a severe psychological disorder rather than a mild form of distress and maybe that is why, culturally, in the Netherlands people are familiar with the term.
In Sri Lanka on the other hand a person who has completed one year of continuous service in the public or private sector is entitled to sick leave of no more than seven days with full remuneration. Even if a burnout was classified as a medical condition in Sri Lanka, one would not get time out from work to recover.
Is burnout a privilege?
So this is where the question for me ‘is burnout a privilege’ arises. Rationally, I know that taking care of yourself is not an indulgent luxury; it's a matter of self preservation (years of therapy have drilled this into me). I also know that logically, privilege doesn’t protect you from burnout. However socio-economic factors, such as the availability of a social security system does.
I know from working in Sri Lanka that people work, not just for themselves, but often have a large number of dependents and stopping work because you are burnt out is not an option.
Therefore I’ve concluded that it’s very important to distinguish between having the symptoms of burnout and actually being able to burn out. We are all human so of course anyone is susceptible to the symptoms. However I truly believe that being in a position where you can treat and address this, is a privilege.
