Part III: 1980s to the late 2000s: Finding Ways to Deal With Burnout
The Continuing Discourse on How to Discuss & Solve U.S. Nursing Burnout: A Historical Perspective on the Issue, From 1974 to 2023
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1980s to the late 2000s: Finding Ways to Help Nurses Deal With Burnout
Moving into the 1980s, the term burnout is more established and is being more well-explored in how to combat it and its causes. In her 1990 article entitled “Are You Stressed Out”, social psychologist Dr. Glynis Breakwell, PhD describes burnout as a “stress syndrome” that is “associated with a growing disinterest in the welfare of patients and a desire to withdraw from them”. Breakwell used a stress level checklist as a way for readers to monitor their likelihood of burnout, with all of the prompts relating to workplace shortcomings . She also focuses on the psychological and behavioral effects of stress, such as deteriorating memory, falling into depression, and not feeling any sense of enthusiasm. Relating 1990 Breakwell to 1979 Storlie, they are both similar in that they both highlight imbalances in the workplace environment as the main drivers to burnout. However, while Storlie sees burnout as the inability for nurses to give their all to caring for patients, Breakwell focuses more on the dissatisfaction of caring for patients in general.
The previous time period has shown that methods of reducing nursing burnout emphasized creating guidelines and boundaries with your workplace. In the 1980s to early 2000s period, more methods of handling burnout are explored. In the book chapter “A History of Fatigue,” historian Emily Abel discusses how an emphasis on the association between stress and burnout had an impact on research and policymaking for family care in the United States. In 2008 and 2016, the Institute of Medicine called for expansion of support of government-funded programs to caregivers because they need “greater recognition, information, and support to both help them care for older relatives or friends and to maintain their own health, financial security, and well being.” Without more government support, the self-help industry targeted caregivers to assist them in reducing their stress and avoiding burnout. The book “The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for Persons with Alzheimer’s Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss in Later Life”, for instance, has helped caregivers care for their loved ones.
Hoffarth described Maslach’s belief that the social and situational environment creates burnout and recommends creating boundaries with others to alleviate burnout. However, when the environment is difficult to change, Maslach recommends improving the “types of ‘interpersonal skill’ people could learn to make work more bearable, including learning how to talk to people about uncomfortable topics and how to start, continue and end conversations”. What this means for nurses is that history has shown that change is hard to come by if they do not focus on themselves to defeat burnout. Institutions can be slow to change unless individuals work hard to fight for the change. This sentiment is further explored in the next time period.
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FOOTNOTES
Glynis Breakwell, “Are You Stressed Out,” The American Journal of Nursing 90, no. 8 (1990): 31–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/3463949.
Emily Abel, “A History of Fatigue,” In Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 41-42.
Matthew Hoffarth, “The making of burnout: From social change to self-awareness in the postwar United States, 1970-82,” History of the Human Sciences 30, no. 5 (Dec 2017): 32, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695117724929.
