6 February 2021 | New Scientist | 35>deterioration was quite noticeable,” he says.
Studies in the US have uncovered similar
findings. One recent survey of burnout among
doctors there, for example, found that women
were affected more than men, probably
because women are also absorbing more
of the increased workload at home.
Clearly, most of us aren’t dealing with the
life-or-death situations faced by many medical
workers, and which may be fuelling problems
(see “Front-line burnout”, p36). But with
renewed lockdowns and travel restrictions
in many countries, the fear is that more
vulnerable groups will be pushed further
towards burnout and could be joined by
people who coped alright first time round.
Burnout isn’t, Maslach is keen to point out, a
mental disorder, although it can certainly stem
from and lead to mental illness. Instead, it is a
natural reaction to a situation that has become
intolerable to the person experiencing it.
Still, the more insidious kind of burnout
from the pressures we all face during the
pandemic isn’t to be sniffed at. Last month,
Mark Ormrod, a former Royal Marine who lost
both legs and an arm in an explosion while
serving in Afghanistan, told the BBC that
homeschooling his two children while also
trying to keep up with his day job ranked
among his “most traumatic memories”.
A random poll of workers in the US
found that almost 60 per cent were feeling
the effects of burnout in August 2020, up from
45 per cent in the early days of the pandemic,
with 39 per cent of those affected blaming their
burnout symptoms on the struggle to balance
work and home life.
And research by psychologist Moïra