A woman clutching her head, with a stressed facial expression, and pale blurring in the foreground. Photo: By Uday Mittal on Unsplash.
From stress to spirituality: Stephen G Wright on burnout
‘Within the crisis there is potential to discover meaning and purpose.’
Between the probable and the proved there yawns
A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,
Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,
Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns
Our only hope: to leap into the Word
That opens up the shuttered universe.
Sheldon Vanauken
A Severe Mercy, 1977
The topic of burnout appears to have surfaced more in the general media in recent years, highlighted by the pressures on key workers during the Covid pandemic (and more recently raised as an issue in the Covid-19 inquiry). Burnout is portrayed in these instances as almost entirely a product of extreme stress. It is rooted in definitions provided in the seminal work of Christina Maslach in the 1980s, which portrayed burnout as a psychological phenomenon creating physiological effects.
