Job Burnout Linked to Depression

the Psychiatry Advisor take:

Job burnout may coincide with depression, according to the results of a new study involving public school teachers.

Irvin S. Schonfeld, PhD, City College of New York Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, and Renzo Bianchi, Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, conducted a survey of 1,386 public school teachers from pre-K through 12^th grade across the United States during the 2013-14 academic year.

Based on their responses, fewer than 1% of teachers who showed no signs of burnout had a diagnosis of depression. However, 86% of those in the burnout group met criteria for depression, the researchers reported in The Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Teachers in the burnout group were also nearly three times more likely to have a history of depression, and four times as likely to be on an antidepressant than teachers in the other group. Those in the burnout group were also twice as likely to have a history of anxiety disorders.

“Our purpose was not to determine the prevalence of burnout or depressive symptoms in a representative sample of teachers,” Schonfeld and Bianchi wrote. “Our analytic purpose was to determine the extent to which burnout and depression overlap, both dimensionally and categorically.”