Jessi Gold, chief wellness officer at the University of Tennessee System and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences, writes that burnout in higher education differs from depression because it stems from workplace systems, not individual mental states. The International Classification of Diseases recognizes burnout as a workplace-associated condition, though it does not appear in the psychiatric diagnostic manual.
Gold identifies three dimensions of burnout. Emotional exhaustion manifests as feeling spent at day's end. Cynicism or depersonalization appears as anger, numbness, or disconnection from colleagues and work. Reduced sense of personal accomplishment emerges when people feel they are doing less or producing less.
In healthcare, burnout affects around 50 percent of workers, making it feel normal. Gold cites a study of surgeons in which nearly 71 percent of those scoring in the bottom 30 percent on wellbeing measures thought their wellness was at or above average. Workers compare themselves to equally burned-out colleagues and conclude they are performing adequately.
Gold spoke with Kristen Black, Guerry associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Black said burnout has become normalized in higher education, where people "often thrive on having too much to do and not enough time to do it." She stated, "Burnout is not just an individual problem. You cannot mindfully meditate yourself out of the demands of an 80-hour work week. Organizational leaders that control and contextualize the everyday workload have a responsibility to help workers not burn out through the structure and design of work."
Gold argues that higher education must shift its culture to stop treating burnout as inevitable or aspirational. Recognizing burnout as harmful rather than a badge of honor could allow institutions to build cultures of prevention and recovery.