The [Unexplored] Intersectionality of Burnout
Katherine [Katu] Medina-Pineda, MHC-LP
The term burnout was coined in the 1970s by psychoanalyst Herbert Freundenberger as he reckoned the toll cumulative exhaustion was taking on his mind and body. Since then, the studies around burnout and mental health have focused primarily within the context of employment. Burnout is currently understood as the direct effect of chronic work- and work-related interpersonal stress. The measurements used in research studies about burnout focus on one or all three of the following dimensions: exhaustion (tiredness, loss of motivation, feeling worn out or weak), cynicism/dehumanization (no patience for others, social withdrawal, loss of idealism/purpose/motivation), and inefficiency (making more mistakes, less productive, poor adaptation to stress, low morale). Studies from around the world demonstrate that while burnout is not itself “diagnosible”, it can lead to depression, anxiety, increased likelihood for heart and metabolic diseases such as diabetes, and it can lead to increased frequency and duration of physical injury.
While I would completely agree that burnout is an appropriate natural response to capitalism, I disagree that it is exclusively work-related. As the global north is fighting to maintain the status quo by defaulting to radical fascism (arguably, we have always been governed by fascism as it intimately aligned with colonialism), we are experiencing collective burnout as we are forced to reckon with the fact that the maintenance of the status quo requires us to dehumanize ourselves in order to dehumanize each other.
Trans rights are being gutted, people are being profiled and deported without due process to torture prisons, and protesters are being disappeared for speaking out against the Palestinian holocaust- meanwhile, the majority of us are going about our days, going to work, completing house chores, running errands, consuming what capitalism churns out as paywalled self-care. As we enter another recession, I notice myself and folks around me turn toward our squirrel-like anxiety to gather as many resources as we can to brave the tumultuous time ahead. We are so tired from working to make cents of the CEO’s dollar that we cannot and are not violently resisting governments that are violently subjugating us first, thus maintaining the cycle of exploitation.
Burnout is exhaustion, social withdrawal, and loss of idealism; and it is also our inability to imagine and engage in dissent and revolution. Burnout is also our internalized white supremacy bringing us a sense of comfort in the face of radical fascism- that there is enough assimilation, enough rule-following, and enough political abstinence one can practice in order to survive radical fascism. That as long as the government is not coming for you, you do not have to worry (yet). And for a lot of people, there is also generational burnout– a deep subconscious knowing that we carry our ancestors’ exhaustion and that we may feel it in ways that they were unable to in order to survive. That the tiredness, the rage, the grief, and the hopelessness one feels is not only theirs but also their parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’.
So it makes sense to feel numb instead, to find respite in routine and distraction, to avert your attention away from the pain you witness in others and the pain you experience yourself, to focus on what you can do to help yourself feel better. I do not have nor will I leave you with a false promise that we can coping-tool our way out of burnout or fascism. Instead, I invite us [you, the reader, as much as me] to stop running away from burnout or try to fix it so that we may access the rage we need to resist. Maybe it is time to stop going to work and start throwing rocks at ICE and Police like our Palestinian siblings, to reinforce and expand existing mutual aid networks and create new ones like The Black Panthers did, to grow food in our neighborhoods to feed each other, to scream at our so-called political representatives and physically stop them from voting against us and our siblings across the world like the Maori disrupting the parliament in New Zealand, the Korean democratic party members climbing a wall to stop the escalation of threats and violence coming from the north, and the Serbian lawmakers smoking out the parliament. Let Empire die so that we may all live.
Sources:
King, N. (2016, December 8). When a psychologist succumbed to stress, he coined the term 'Burnout'. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2016/12/08/504864961/when-a-psychologist-succumbed-to-stress-he-coined-the-term-burnout
Maslach C, Leiter MP. Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry. 2016 Jun;15(2):103-11. doi: 10.1002/wps.20311. PMID: 27265691; PMCID: PMC4911781.