Burnout and psychiatric “cases”: Early evidences of an association

Abstract

This exploratory study extends the phase model of burnout in a critical direction by assessing whether individuals assigned to eight progressive phases will present escalating mental health symptoms. Despite the small convenience population (N = 161), the present affirmative results encourage early replications for three basic reasons. Thus the associations with mental health reported here are consistent with numerous other tests of the concurrent validity of the phase model. Moreover, substantial proportions of the variance are explained here by data supporting the view that the progressive phases are associated with accelerating proportions of “cases,” here defined as respondents to the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) who report four or more non-psychotic psychiatric symptoms. The GHQ form used here is modified for U.S. contexts. In addition, this basic conclusion is reinforced in three ways: by factor analysis of GHQ items; by rejecting several variables alternative to the phases as GHQ variants; and by using canonical discriminant functions to compare phase assignments with the actual group memberships of “normals” and “cases” assigned by the GHQ.