Critique trend of burn-out diagnosis

Criticism of sick leave due to burnout syndrome

27/04/2013

Dissipated Germans? Sick leave due to burnout syndrome as „fad“? The head of the Rostock University Hospital for Psychosomatics criticizes the fashion diagnosis burnout syndrome. The willingness is great to see an excessive demand as a burn-out.

Burnout - No independent disease
Only since the 1970s does the term burnout appear in medicine. This condition is treated as an influencing factor, but not as an independent disease. This burned out leads to emotional exhaustion with reduced efficiency. Now warns Wolfgang Schneider, head of the Rostock University of Psychosomatics, before the willingness too large, to view as overwhelmed. Tiredness, listlessness and slackness were previously considered to be concomitants of professional life, but these are now often classified as burnout. The Rostock specialist observes the since the 1990s steadily rising numbers of sick leave due to mental illness with great skepticism. He means: „There is a great willingness of people to view themselves as mentally stressed and therefore get sick leave.“ This is a consequence of the media hype about burnout syndrome. The Director of the University Hospital continues: „The threshold at which symptoms are referred to as the expression of a mental illness, decreases. The diagnosis of mental illness is too fast and too frequent.“

Problematic diagnoses
Accurate analysis shows, according to Schneider, that the number of people working on one „established“ mental illness has been stable for 20 to 30 years. In women it is 33 percent and in men 25 percent. However, lost work because of the burnout syndrome. More and more people complain that in the workplace and society too much is required of them and makes everything sick. „But a certain amount of fatigue, exhaustion, demotivation or sleep disturbances in professional or private problems belongs to the normal range of human experience - black painting also has negative effects“, so tailor. He also warned: „It is not advisable to pathologize everything“, because who the diagnosis is made and medication prescribed, his problems are only really pushed.

Fad Burnout and strong increase in anti-depressant prescriptions
„Just as the term burnout is currently used, it has become a veritable fashion concept“, Gregor Peikert, psychotherapist of the University Hospital Jena told the German Press Agency (dpa). The medical profession is partly to blame for the more common diagnosis of burnout. Wolfgang Schneider, head of the Rostock University Hospital, formulated: „We create new diseases.“ Also problematic is the low number of psychotherapists, which leads to bottlenecks in psychotherapies. Too often psychotropic drugs are prescribed and the real problems are not addressed. The pharmaceutical industry "influenced the diagnostic system and many patients received psychotropic drugs rather than psychotherapy". In men, the prescriptions of antidepressants increased in the years 2000 to 2010 by about 80 percent, in women even by 130 percent. (Sb)

Also read:
With sports against burnout
Fashion diagnosis burnout syndrome

Picture: Gerd Altmann