The Washington Post

handout

slaveholder congress main shareimg

by Joseph Siffred Duplessis

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Chance to move over .500 slips away as Nats lose to reigning champs

T.J. Oshie, the heart of the Caps, wants to keep playing. He’s not sure if he can.

Nationals sweep away the Marlins to get back to .500

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

Borrowers, don’t miss this important student loan forgiveness deadline

Biden’s internet-for-all program needs Musk’s help

Microsoft’s “responsible AI” chief worries about the open web

How the push to ban TikTok spurred a new Washington influence machine

A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

UnitedHealth grew very big. Now, some lawmakers want to chop it down.

The new face of flooding

How celebrity tequilas are changing the very nature of tequila

Man arrested at Yellowstone for allegedly kicking bison while drunk

Southwest passengers now get a $75 voucher for big flight disruptions

The Rick Steves guide to life

Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

Meet Emo, the AI robot that can predict your smile

Speaker Johnson: deploy National Guard to Columbia

Biden is aiming increasingly personal and sarcastic jabs at Trump

Views of the campus protests are too broad — and too narrow

Attorney general moves to reclassify marijuana as lower-risk drug

I coach my son’s sports team. Why is he so disrespectful during practice?

Miss Manners: How to decline donation requests at checkout

Ask Amy: My friends took my advice, but they’re doing it wrong

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

The delusions behind Biden’s plan for Middle East peace 

Middle East conflict live updates: Blinken meets Netanyahu in Jerusalem; U.S. presses Israel on Gaza aid

Is Bougainville the next battleground between China and the U.S.?

 Donald Trump Speaks During A Campaign Rally In Green Bay Wisconsin

Marty Lederhandler

In the song “Shelter From the Storm,” recorded in 1974, Bob Dylan reels off a long litany of troubles. Among them: being “burned out from exhaustion.” The line, which appeared on the chart-topping album “Blood on the Tracks,” distilled a significant cultural moment. The mid-1970s was when burnout as we know it first gained scientific legitimacy and broad public attention.

Today, burnout is a keyword for how we talk about our problems with work. Burnout was <a href="https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/why-are-people-really-quitting-their-jobs-burnout-tops-list-new-research-shows.html">cited in one recent survey</a> as the main reason record numbers of people quit their jobs in 2021. (Meanwhile, the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/02/the-great-resignation-is-burning-out-those-who-stay.html">people who stayed behind</a> in understaffed workplaces were experiencing their own burnout.) But burnout has been with us for decades. And like Dylan’s career, its origin story is tangled up in the counterculture of Lower Manhattan.

In the early 1970s, Herbert Freudenberger, a psychologist in New York, would regularly put 10 hours a day into his private practice and then head downtown for a second shift at the St. Mark’s Free Clinic, which served the medical needs of young people living in the East Village, helping them with everything from drug addiction to dental cavities. Freudenberger had helped found the clinic in 1970 after spending the summer of 1968 at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco, ministering to hippies.

He identified strongly with his patients at the St. Mark’s clinic. “Their problems, their battles, became mine,” he later wrote. After the clinic closed for the night, he and the volunteer staff would hold meetings until the wee hours. Freudenberger would then head back uptown, get a few hours of sleep and do it all again the next day.

After about a year on this schedule, Freudenberger broke down. His daughter Lisa recalls him being unable to get out of bed on a morning the family was supposed to leave for vacation.

The term “burn-out” was already in circulation in his professional world. An official at a rehabilitation center for young adult offenders in Southern California mentioned it as a “phenomenon” among treatment staff in a 1969 paper. St. Mark’s Free Clinic workers used the term to describe themselves, but they may have picked it up from the East Village streets, where people used it to describe heroin users’ veins: Inject into a spot long enough, and it becomes useless, burned out. In a 1980 book, Freudenberger compared “Burn-Outs” like himself to burned-out buildings.

To understand what had happened to him, Freudenberger turned his psychoanalytic training on himself. He spoke into a tape recorder, then played the tape back, as if he were his own patient. In 1974, he published a paper titled “Staff Burn-Out” in an academic journal. In the paper, Freudenberger asked, “Who is prone to burn-out?” His answer was unambiguous: “The dedicated and the committed.” Free Clinic staff offered “our talents, our skills, we put in long hours with a bare minimum of financial compensation,” Freudenberger wrote. “But it is precisely because we are dedicated that we walk into a burn-out trap. We work too long and too intensely. We feel a pressure from within to work and help and we feel a pressure from the outside to give.”

Freudenberger’s analysis of burnout was unscientific and not rigorously worked out. He didn’t have a survey or a scale for measuring burnout, only limited observations that, for instance, people typically burned out after about a year working at the clinic. His language merged psychoanalytic jargon with counterculture lingo. He dropped ’70s slang like “speed freaks” and “self con” and used “bad rap” as a verb.

Freudenberger’s list of burnout symptoms was wide: “exhaustion, being unable to shake a lingering cold, suffering from frequent headaches and gastrointestinal disturbances, sleeplessness and shortness of breath,” as well as “quickness to anger,” paranoia, overconfidence, cynicism and isolation. In short, burnout was everywhere, because anything could be burnout.

Gerald Ford responded to an inflation crisis with a voluntary public campaign. It was a disaster.

Around the time Freudenberger was pulling double shifts in New York, Christina Maslach was on the other side of the country, trying to convince psychologist Philip Zimbardo to put a stop to his now-infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students were asked to role-play as inmates and guards in a mocked-up prison for a planned two weeks.

In the summer of 1971, Maslach had just completed her PhD at Stanford and was dating Zimbardo. When she visited the prison site on its fifth day, she was horrified by the brutality ordinary-seeming college students could inflict on each other, with “guards” physically humiliating “prisoners” and placing them in solitary confinement. When she spoke with Zimbardo that evening, she later recounted: “I started to scream, I started to yell, ‘I think it is terrible what you are doing to those boys!’ ” Zimbardo ended the experiment the next morning.

Andy Kropa

Maslach, who married Zimbardo in 1972, soon began studying a similar phenomenon in human-services work: “how people who are responsible for the care and treatment of others can come to view those they care for in object-like ways.” She found that “detached concern” is a crucial mode for caregivers, though different professions approach it in different ways. While the norms of health-care work demand an attitude that combines sympathetic concern with clinical objectivity, human-service workers typically engage emotionally with their clients, only to find that, over time, the work drains them.

Detachment is a protective strategy, she wrote in 1973, but “if the detachment becomes too extreme, the service professional experiences ‘burn-out,’ a phrase which is used by poverty lawyers to describe the loss of any human feeling for their clients.” Maslach’s report preceded Freudenberger’s paper by only a few months. Burnout was a simultaneous discovery whose influence soon grew well beyond research papers and became a cultural buzzword, much as it is today.

After World War II, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers mutinied — and won

It can’t be coincidence that Freudenberger and Maslach independently “discovered” burnout in 1973-74. Something was happening in American society that they both detected. Dylan picked up on it, too. So did Neil Young in early 1974, singing of “burn-outs” aimlessly dragging their feet in his song “Ambulance Blues.” What was going on that made burnout just the right word to make sense of this cultural moment?

The broken idealism of the 1960s may have played a role. The counterculture of the era — including, surely, people Freudenberger worked with at the St. Mark’s Free Clinic — imagined ways of living that did not place 9-to-5 work at the center. But by the 1970s, it had made little dent in the establishment. Thousands of optimistic and well-educated people went into human-service careers, motivated to win the “War on Poverty,” only to discover how intractable society’s problems were, and how much time they would spend ensnared in bureaucracy.

As important as those disappointed ideals may be to the emergence of burnout in the early 1970s, there was a still bigger factor involved. Burnout first came to public attention at a critical transition point in the history of work in America. With decades of hindsight, historians now see 1974 as “a watershed between eras,” as Jefferson Cowie puts it in “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595587071?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=1595587071" target=_blank>Stayin’ Alive</a>,” his book on the 1970s working class. Prior to 1974, the New Deal consensus on labor still reigned: If productivity increased, so would workers’ wages. Accordingly, the real wages of rank-and-file workers steadily rose, reaching their peak in 1973.

This did not mean an absence of conflict within the labor movement, though. A younger generation of union members wanted to fight against the fast pace and deadening repetition of work on the lines. Their elders argued that they already had favorable contracts, so why did they want to agitate against boredom?

Still, an internal debate over the quality of work signaled a labor movement with real power. It wouldn’t last.

After 1974, the mid-century golden age crumbled. The ignominious ends of the Nixon presidency and the Vietnam War shook Americans’ faith in their political institutions. American manufacturing and organized labor drowned in a toxic brew of global competition, the “oil shock” resulting from an OPEC embargo and rapid inflation. For the first time since World War II, workers’ productivity gains became detached from their wages.

Since 1974, labor productivity has kept increasing, but workers’ compensation has not. Real wages for nonsupervisory employees actually declined in the 1970s and 80s, and, aside from a temporary uptick caused by the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> pandemic’s effect on the workforce, they still have still not recovered. “The continuous readjustment of expectations — downward: that was a key experience of the 1970s,” writes historian Rick Perlstein.

The problems facing the United States in the 1970s weren’t just political or economic; they were emotional. Historians and contemporary observers called the events of the middle of the decade a national “nervous breakdown,” “a collective sadness.” The decade ended with President Jimmy Carter diagnosing the whole country with a chronic spiritual sickness in a televised address that has come to be known as the “malaise speech.”

America had become a burnout case: exhausted, cynical and consumed by a feeling of uselessness.

At the dawn of the 1980s, burnout became a key term to describe the condition of frazzled, defeated American workers. Maslach soon developed a theory of burnout’s institutional causes, and Freudenberger’s 1980 book “Burn-Out: The High Cost of High Achievement” became a popular self-help guide. In 1981, the president of the air traffic controllers’ union cited “early burnout” as the first reason union members were going on strike for higher wages and a shorter workweek.

The Swiss psychiatrist who inspired a viral TikTok hashtag

The strike was a moment of optimism in the fight against burnout; it must have seemed possible to cure the condition through collective action. When President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 controllers for refusing his return-to-work order, that hope was extinguished. Reagan’s decision sent a message that workers still hear today: They will deal with burnout on their own, or not at all. A year later, the term had apparently become so commonplace that William Safire declared in his New York Times “On Language” column that it was itself “undergoing linguistic burnout.”

Even as research on burnout grew in the 1990s and 2000s, the term went into a two-decade dormant period in the United States. Meanwhile, it traveled overseas. Maslach and two co-authors observed in a 2009 paper that “roughly speaking, the order in which the interest in burnout seems to have spread corresponds with the economic development of the countries involved.” That is, burnout began as a concern of wealthy North American and European countries, then propagated to Latin America, Africa and Asia.

In 2019, burnout was classified as a “syndrome,” though not an illness, in the World Health Organization’s main compendium of diagnoses, the International Classification of Diseases. In a few European countries, including Sweden, burnout is an official diagnosis that can entitle its sufferers to paid time off and other sickness benefits. In Finland, burned-out workers can qualify for paid rehabilitation workshops that feature 10 days of intensive individual and group activities, including counseling, exercise and nutrition classes.

Even as awareness of burnout has grown, public and scientific understanding of the condition has not progressed much. There is still little consensus on how to measure burnout and no widely acknowledged means to diagnose it. Burnout has no status as a disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. We still hear echoes of Freudenberger’s vague, catchall list of symptoms decades later.

In 1980, Freudenberger attributed burnout to the fast pace of social and economic change, from the sexual revolution to consumerism. “At the same time,” he wrote, “TV has exposed us to alluring pictures of people leading the ‘good life.’” Substitute Instagram for television, and it could have been published yesterday.

This story is adapted from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520344073?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0520344073" target=_blank>“The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives,”</a> by Jonathan Malesic, which will be published by the University of California Press on Jan. 4.

Jonathan Malesic

washpost