1st Edition

Professional Burnout in Medicine and the Helping Professions

    Physicians and other helping professionals have created a practical, hands-on book that will aid in the identification and reduction of job stress. Nurses, physicians, thanatologists, and psychotherapists are among the growing number of health care professionals whose physical and mental health are being severely affected by work stress. This unique volume achieves what no earlier book has attempted for this specialized professional group. It offers a thorough understanding of professional burnout, elaborating how burnout develops and offering a model with which to identify job stressors. Professional Burnout in Medicine and the Helping Professions also offers an in-depth exploration of stress and burnout issues from the perspectives of specific medical and helping profession disciplines--physicians, nurses, social workers, psychotherapists, teachers, consultants, agency and hospital workers, funeral directors, and more.

    Experts in these fields examine the values, ethics, and morality of individuals, health care organizations, and society that may lead to burnout This in-depth and highly practical volume identifies the stages of disillusionment and offers successful intervention strategies for recognizing the signs and reducing or efficiently managing causative factors.

    Contents Foreword
    • Preface
    • I. An Overview of Burnout
    • Burnout: Past, Present, and Future Concerns
    • The Etiology of Job Stress
    • II. Burnout and the Professional Care Giver
    • Burnout in the Professional Care Giver: Does the Phoenix Have to Burn or Why Can’t Icarus Stay Aloft?
    • The Prevention and Treatment of Professional Burnout
    • Professional Burnout in Medicine and the Helping Professions
    • Physician “Burnout”
    • Minimizing Professional Burnout: Caring for the Care Givers
    • III. Causation Aspects of Burnout
    • A Moral Theory of Burnout: The Evaluation of Work
    • Burnout: What Price Care Giving?
    • Burnout: Absence of Vision
    • IV: Burnout and Institutional/Agency Centers
    • Burnout--A Study of a Psychiatric Center
    • Is Burnout an Institutional Syndrome?
    • V. Combatting Burnout
    • Rekindling the Flame: A Self Psychology View of Burnout
    • A Day With Our Feelings
    • Offsetting Burnout in the Thanatologic Setting: Recognition and Emphasis of “Psychosocial Successes” in Social Work Intervention

    Biography

    Dorsey Thomas Wessells, Jr., EdD, is a Licensed Professional Counselor in private practice in Virginia Beach and Newport News, Virginia. Austin H. Kutscher is President of The Foundation of Thanatology, and Professor of Dentistry (in Psychiatry) at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, in New York City. Irene 8. Seeland, MD, is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center and Attending Psychiatrist at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Florence E. Selder, PhD, RN, is Associate Professor and Urban Research Center Scientist, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Elizabeth J. Clark, PhD, is currently an Associate Professor of Health Professions and Assistant to the Dean of the School of Professional Studies at Montclair State College in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.