Diagnosing burn-out : an anthropological study of a social concept in Sweden

Burn-out is not exotic anymore. On the contrary, it is all pervasive for people living in Sweden, taking the form of stories, biographies, newspaper articles, and policy decisions about how to deal with the pressures of everyday life. Most Swedes know someone who has been burned-out or is approaching burn-out, and they are all made continually aware of the various signs of burn-out. The stress discourse, and the accompanying fear of burn-out are on everybody’s lips. People are discussing and arguing about burn-out as a relevant issue in our contemporary period. These discussions are raising issues about what human beings are, how we act in our working lives and in our leisure time, and how we deal with the pressures of a life which seems ever more stressful. How should an anthropologist understand burn-out? Should the point of departure be with the subjective experience of the burn-out person, or would it be more productive to focus on the contextual or behavioural factors? Is burn-out to be seen as a societal problem or as a personal solution to a problematic society? In this study, submitted as a doctoral dissertation in social anthropology, Torbjörn Friberg provides an alternative approach to the stress discourse which so dominates present-day burn-out research. Friberg views burn-out as a solution rather than problem, and he focuses on the social environment of the burn-out diagnosis rather than individual experiences. The task, he argues is to understand what made the burn-out diagnosis acceptable, even normal, in Swedish society. Against this background, Friberg deals with the genesis, use, and oncoming decline of burn-out as a social concept. He explains the complex web of interaction between the actions of troubled individuals and their social milieu, and how this produces a transient phenomenon—the burn-out diagnosis. Burn-out is “a new way to be an unhappy person” (to quoting philosopher Ian Hacking) This study provides an analysis of a complex transient phenomenon by relying on accounts of individuals acting in a ”new” social milieu. The study involves several different sites with several different sources of data: ethnographic fieldwork at burn-out rehabilitation centres; informal network meetings in homes of burnt-out persons and at public cafés; interviews with therapeutic professionals attending workshops and seminars case reports, scientific documentation, media coverage and internet sites for burn-out victims Special focus on two rehabilitation centres which specialize in treating people suffering from burnout. The author shows that burn-out is best seen as a personal solution to a social problem, and that an anthropology of policy, policies of the self, can help us understand the rise and demise of transient phenomena such as the burn-out diagnosis.