Individualizing the burnout problem: Health professionals’ discourses of burnout and recovery in the context of rehabilitation

This discourse analytical study explores how health professionals (HPs) construct burnout as a form of mental distress in the context of Finnish burnout rehabilitation framed with a particular rehabilitation ethos. Burnout is a fuzzy concept and lacks a disease status. Therefore, it calls for context-specific definition and justification. By highlighting the socially and interactionally produced character of categories of mental distress, the study investigates the kinds of discourses HPs use to formulate “the problem” and its solutions, and how people dealing with burnout are categorized in these discourses. The data consists of field notes from the observation of group discussion sessions in two 1-year burnout rehabilitation courses. As a result of the analysis, five partly overlapping discourses were identified: psychological, evolutionary, healthy lifestyle, biomedical, and welfare. Within these discourses, people who experience burnout were categorized as over-conscientious employees, “good girls,” “primitive people,” self-responsible rehabilitees, patients, and (aging) employees with social and legal rights. Burnout rehabilitation and HPs’ views reproduce a cultural and clinical discourse around burnout in which work-related problems are treated as individual-level problems and individuals are responsibilized for the management of mental distress. Based on the results, it is concluded that the hybrid type of interventions that attempt to influence both individual- and work-related problems behind burnout would help to prevent people dealing with burnout from being over-responsibilized for solving problems at the workplace.