TITLE:
Subjective Aspects of Burnout Syndrome in the Medical Profession
AUTHORS:
José Manuel García-Arroyo, María Luisa Domínguez-López
KEYWORDS:
Burnout Syndrome, Doctor Health, Emotions, Emotional Management, Subjectivity, Burnout
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.18,
November
25,
2014
ABSTRACT: Burnout is a syndrome related to work over load and associated,
generally, with the helping professions. Here we will study it in relation to
the medical profession, considering the doctor’s personal aspects. For this
purpose, we start with a group of physicians treated psychotherapeutically for
suffering from burnout. The method is qualitative and consists of recording as
accurately as possible the verbal expressions of the patients. Since there was
plenty of verbal material waste, we had to differentiate between “useful
statements” (type I) and “useless” (type II), whose characteristics we defined
exactly. As a result we find that these professionals show emotional
mismanagement due to lack of subjective recognition of affective experiences.
This causes an overflow that physically manifests itself in the absence of any
mental processing, resulting eventually in the triad features of the syndrome.
Subjectively, we find the origin of this in the “medical ideals” that hinder
these professionals from recognizing the above mentioned experiences since they
consider them as inadequate for the performance of their work and contravene
their values. At the same time, these subjects were busy helping others, but
were unable to help themselves or ask for help.