Workers Pay the Price of Burnout. Should Employers Cover the Cost?

hubie writes:

For years workers were taught to endure stress in silence. Now, rising burnout is forcing employers and governments to confront the cost of modern work:

Hayley Hughes said yes to everything. She worked in health care at a Queensland medical centre, managing nine GPs and up to 18 staff, while overseeing a change of ownership.

[...] Over many months of an intense workload, Hayley started to feel physically ill from the stress. She experienced brain fog, a racing heart and insomnia.

[...] The path to burnout recovery can include mental health leave, seeing a doctor, maybe receiving a diagnosis of anxiety or depression, medicating yourself, and returning to work ready to roll again.

Or - like Jeffrey and Hayley - you could change roles, reduce hours or move into less senior or less stressful positions.

[...] While taking control of burnout can help recovery, more people are asking if the onus should be on employers.

With almost half of Australian workers feeling burnt out, experts are asking how workplace culture and systems contribute to, or even cause, exhaustion, and whether systemic change might lead to a reduction in burnout overall.

The question of who is responsible for burnout matters. Whether we define burnout as an individual failing or a systemic one determines how we treat it. And, in turn, determines where the responsibility, and the cost, lands.

Burnout has entered the cultural lexicon with a thoroughness that has outpaced its clinical definition.

It is discussed in podcast episodes and performance reviews, in resignation letters and therapy sessions, on TikTok and in medical journals. Yet despite its ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, there remains no consensus on what burnout actually is and, critically, whose responsibility it is to prevent and treat it.

[...] "From my experience, unless the condition is part of the psychiatric manual, it doesn't exist. Insurers won't recognise burnout," he says. "What happens instead is people take their accrued leave, or [seek a diagnosis of] depression in order to get sick leave."

This pathway comes at a cost. Depression is classified as a disorder of the individual, a medical condition located in the person's brain, body, and history.

When a burned-out worker is diagnosed as depressed, the implied cause shifts from the workplace to the worker. The worker uses their own leave, sees a doctor on their own dime, takes medication, pays for therapy and formulates individual coping strategies.

When they recover, they often return to a workplace unchanged from the one where the injury occurred in the first place.

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