Psych Group Is Blowin' Smoke with Burnout Remedies

The media and self-help industry offer a lot of bad advice on how to ease burnout: Be here now. Suffer through a resilience workshop. Dance to your favorite song (no, really — I witnessed a PhD-level psychologist prescribing this as a burnout remedy in a webinar for mental health coaches).

Now, in a post called Burnout: Small Changes Lead to Big Results (soon to be followed by an infographic), the American Psychiatric Association weighs in with its own tepid, unfounded advice, cloaked in a veneer of evidence: "Remind leaders…; Find opportunities…; Remind everyone…; Find ways…; Evaluate and ensure…; Consider part of the job… Find ways."

"Small Changes, Big Impact"? Well, the first half is true.

There's no reason to think the Association's tips will lead to any impact at all — big or small. To suggest otherwise is as dismissive of the pain of hardworking people as... well, as advice to dance to your favorite song.

I don't mean to throw shade on the American Psychiatric Association. They don't have much to work with. Nearly 50 years ago, psychologists came up with some compelling ideas about burnout. All these years later, we have no meaningful advice to offer employers — and no response to the folk remedies hawked by the self-help, HR consulting, and burgeoning mental health industries — because the research has been nothing other than a hot mess ever since.

Maybe it's time for a reset? I'll say more about this in a future post.

We have to do better than "Find ways."