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Burnout in Quebec. Behind Psychological Suffering, Shifting in Social Representation and Relation to Work

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Stress and Suffering at Work

Abstract

It took a little over thirty-five years for burnout, as a “new” syndrome and pathological category, to enjoy resounding social visibility and clinical success, first in the USA and then in Canada and Quebec. But what made this success possible, particularly in Quebec? The last chapter, written by Laurie Kirouac, proposes to see burnout as a transient mental illness (Hacking 1998), that is, as a form of pathology that is inseparable from the social, cultural, and normative changes that a given society is experiencing at a given time. First, it will elaborate on the main clinical definitions of burnout as a diagnostic category in order to highlight how these definitions are, each in their own way, marked by a cultural polarity. Second, the chapter will examine the transformations that social representations of work have undergone in recent decades and how these transformations echo the aforementioned clinical definitions. Third, it will discuss what could be viewed as an increase in the place occupied by work in the lives of contemporaries in recent decades, resulting in an increase in burnout cases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We freely use the terms “pathological category” and “common mental disorder” to refer to burnout, even though it does not strictly speaking appear in the main reference and classification manuals (i.e., the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] and the International Classification of Diseases [ICD]). We should note, however, that these terms are recognized in the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) as “problems related to life-management difficulty” and described under Z.73.0 as “burnout—state of total exhaustion” (WHO 1992). Moreover, some have observed that while jurisdictions regulating the labor market in North America have so far been reluctant to recognize burnout as a clinical diagnosis, it is partially due to concerns about a flood of requests for disability coverage (Maslach and Leiter 2016). In Quebec, the term “adjustment disorder”, which is found in several of the more recent versions of the DSM (III, III-R, IV, V), is commonly used as its diagnostic equivalent.

  2. 2.

    These clinics provided care on the margins of traditional private and public institutions.

  3. 3.

    Different versions of this measuring instrument were subsequently developed.

  4. 4.

    Moreover, given that other occupational groups became interested in the occurrence of burnout, but had some difficulties in adapting the MBI to their work situation, Maslach and her collaborators developed a General Survey (MBI-GS) that could be used in the context of any occupation (Schaufeli et al. 1996).

  5. 5.

    This is particularly true for industrialized countries and less so for developing countries (Cassitto et al. 2003; Houtman et al. 2007).

  6. 6.

    According to Hacking, “to postulate a niche for an illness is to make two kinds of claim, one positive, one negative. In the presence of the relevant vectors, the illness flourishes; in their absence, it does not” (1998: 82).

  7. 7.

    The MBI questionnaire has been widely used to measure burnout as a three-dimensional syndrome: exhaustion, depersonalisation and lack of professional fulfillment.

  8. 8.

    While more prevalent among the most “educated” and “better paid” categories of workers, such work-related expressive aspirations are not exclusive to them. Without denying that belonging and socioeconomic status play a role in the place work occupies in one’s identity (Garner et al. 2006), social status does not explain the whole phenomenon behind this social mutation.

  9. 9.

    For more details on what distinguishes these two systems of labor regulation and the theoretical and empirical way of understanding them, see Kirouac (2015).

  10. 10.

    This is reflected, for instance, in the large number of women who work full time or who choose not to have children. Similarly, for the first time in history, in Canada (28.2% of households) and even more so in Quebec (33.3% of households), solo living is the most common way of life among the population, regardless of age (Statistics Canada 2016).

  11. 11.

    No longer relying as before on “unconditional” legitimacy, institutional agents (teachers, doctors, etc.) are now in a position to defend this legitimacy themselves. As Dubet (2002) explains, once an institution breaks from within and can no longer be thought of as a unified and “sacralized” whole (Dubet 2002), the modern institutional authority, founded on argumentation and negotiation (Dubet 2002), is then primarily transited by the “front-line” institutional agents.

  12. 12.

    Many workers regret the social invisibility of personal efforts spent in carrying out their work, which they often describe as difficult to live with and a source of bitterness (Daloz et al. 2007).

  13. 13.

    This is evidenced, for instance, by the increase in Quebec workers who telework and use technological supports (computers and mobile phones, etc.), which has for effect to blur the line between private and professional life.

  14. 14.

    These demands are increasingly being heard by Quebec’s political parties, which, each in their own way, are proposing political adjustments and corrective measures to promote better work-life balance (Journet 2018).

  15. 15.

    To say that the regulation of the importance of work nowadays depends more directly on individual will and the capacity for individual action does not mean in any case that such regulation now has more chance of succeeding. Clearly, not everyone has the same resources (socioeconomic, cultural, etc.) to fulfill this responsibility.

  16. 16.

    Unlike early studies that explained the pathology in terms of overwork or excessive worker involvement, Truchot (2006) observes that more recent studies on burnout envision strong self-commitment at work both as a trigger for the pathology and as the opposite of burnout (Truchot 2006). For instance, Maslach and Leiter (1999, 2016) hold that a better fit between employees and their work environments results in greater engagement in their work and lower levels of burnout and conceive of work engagement and burnout as opposite ends of a continuum (Maslach and Leiter 1999, 2016).

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  1. Centre de recherche Charles-Le Moyne – Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean sur les innovations en santé, University of Sherbrooke, Longueuil, QC, Canada

    Laurie Kirouac

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  1. Laurie Kirouac
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Correspondence to Laurie Kirouac .

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  1. IDHES, CNRS, Paris I, Bourg-la-Reine, France

    Marc Loriol

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Kirouac, L. (2019). Burnout in Quebec. Behind Psychological Suffering, Shifting in Social Representation and Relation to Work. In: Loriol, M. (eds) Stress and Suffering at Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05876-0_9

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