This blog post about burnout contrasts how we deal with mental health versus physical health issues:
As far as I can tell, 100% of the google results for “burnout” or “recognizing burnout” boil down to victim-blaming; they’re all about you, and your symptoms, and how to recognize when you’re burning out… the burden of recovery is entirely on the person burning out.
If this was advice about a broken leg or anaphylaxis we’d see it for the trash it is, but because it’s about mental health somehow we don’t call it out… Bee stings are just part of life; maybe you should take the time to rethink your breathing strategy.
As the blog post further points out, even the American Medical Association identifies burnout as a structural problem and mitigating it requires structural solutions. Burnout is a problem with the workplace, not with the individual. In fact, in this article I have bookmarked in whole a long time ago,
It’s a common misconception that the culprit behind burnout is simply working too long or too hard… [a]t its core, burnout emerges when the demands of a job outstrip a person’s ability to cope with the stress. Over the past 20 years, Maslach and her collaborators have developed a comprehensive model identifying six key components of the workplace environment that contribute to burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Burnout emerges when one or more of these six areas is chronically mismatched between an individual and his job.
Ultimately, the writer of the original blog post says, we need to completely change the way we think about burnout.
If “mental health” is just “health” – and I guarantee it is – then burnout is an avoidable workplace injury, and I don’t believe in unavoidable mental-health injuries any more than I believe in unavoidable forklift accidents.