Relationship between burnout and Major Depressive Disorder in health professionals: A HEAR report

BACKGROUND

Burnout is a "normal" albeit concerning response to workplace stress, whereas Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious illness associated with impairment and suicide risk. Because of symptomatic overlap between the two conditions and MDD-associated stigma, individuals reporting work-related stress and depression often are "diagnosed" with burnout at the expense of recognizing and treating MDD. Our study aimed to leverage organizational implementation of the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention's Interactive Screening Program to elucidate relationships among burnout, depression, and other suicide risk factors.

METHODS

2281 of about 30,000 (~7.6 %) medical trainees, staff, and faculty responded to an anonymous online stress and depression questionnaire. Respondents were grouped into four cohorts: screened positive for burnout alone (n = 439, 19 %), depression alone (n = 268, 12 %), both conditions (n = 759, 33 %), or neither condition (n = 817, 36 %), and compared on multiple measures of distress and other suicide risk factors.

RESULTS

Burnout alone and depression alone each predicted greater distress and suicide risk compared with neither condition. Depression was a stronger predictor than burnout and demonstrated a consistent association with other suicide risk factors regardless of whether burnout was present. In contrast, burnout was not consistently associated with other suicide risk factors when depression was present.

LIMITATIONS

The sample was limited to one state-supported academic medical center; to individuals who elected to take the online survey; and relied on a single item, non-validated measure of burnout.

CONCLUSION

When emotional distress is reported by healthcare workers, attention should not stop at "burnout," as burnout frequently comingles with clinical depression, a serious and treatable mental health condition.

Understanding Long Covid: Nosology, social attitudes and stigma

The debate around Long Covid has so far shown resistance to accept parallels between Long Covid and a set of existing conditions which have historically been subject to stigma. This resistance risks endorsing the stigma associated with such existing conditions, and as such, these dynamics of stigma ought to be dismantled in order to facilitate the development of effective clinical resources for all such implicated conditions. As well as affecting proceedings at the structural level, I discuss how the aforementioned problems also risk affecting patients at the personal level by motivating the reconfiguration and restriction of patient illness narratives. The problems I identify therefore risk affecting both collective and individual understanding of Long Covid.

Striking the balance with epistemic injustice in healthcare: the case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis

Miranda Fricker's influential concept of epistemic injustice (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007) has recently seen application to many areas of interest, with an increasing body of healthcare research using the concept of epistemic injustice in order to develop both general frameworks and accounts of specific medical conditions and patient groups. This paper illuminates tensions that arise between taking steps to protect against committing epistemic injustice in healthcare, and taking steps to understand the complexity of one's predicament and treat it accordingly. Work on epistemic injustice is therefore at risk of obfuscating legitimate and potentially fruitful inquiry. This paper uses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis as a case study, but I suggest that the key problems identified could apply to other cases within healthcare, such as those classed as Medically Unexplained Illnesses, Functional Neurological Disorders and Psychiatric Disorders. Future work on epistemic injustice in healthcare must recognise and attend to this tension to protect against unsatisfactory attempts to correct epistemic injustice.

Bereavement: course, consequences, and care

This paper discusses each of several potential consequences of bereavement. First, we describe ordinary grief, followed by a discussion of grief gone awry, or complicated grief (CG). Then, we cover other potential adverse outcomes of bereavement, each of which may contribute to, but are not identical with, CG: general medical comorbidity, mood disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and substance use.

The removal of the bereavement exclusion in the DSM-5: exploring the evidence

Since 1980, the DSM-III and its various iterations through the DSM-IV-TR have systematically excluded individuals from the diagnosis of major depressive disorder if symptoms began within months after the death of a loved one (2 months in DSM-IV), unless the depressive syndrome was 'severely' impairing and/or accompanied by specific features. This criterion became known as the 'bereavement exclusion'. No other adverse life events were noted to negate the diagnosis of major depressive disorder if all other symptomatic, duration, severity and distress/impairment criteria were met. However, studies since the inception of the bereavement exclusion have shown that depressive syndromes occurring after bereavement share many of the same features as other, non-bereavement related depressions, tend to be chronic and/or recurrent if left untreated, interfere with the resolution of grief, and respond to treatment. Furthermore, the bereavement exclusion has had the unintended consequence of suggesting that grief should end in only 2 months, or that grief and major depressive disorder cannot co-occur. To prevent the denial of diagnosis and the consideration of sometimes much needed care, even after bereavement or other significant losses, the DSM-5 no longer contains the bereavement exclusion. Instead, the DSM-5 now permits the diagnosis of major depressive disorder after and during bereavement and includes a note and a comprehensive footnote in the major depressive episode criteria set to guide clinicians in making the diagnosis in this context. The decision to make this change was widely and publically debated and remains controversial. This article reports on the rationale for this decision and the way the DSM-5 now addresses the challenges of diagnosing major depressive disorder in the context of someone grieving the loss of a loved one.