“At times I wonder whether we are all going a little soft round the edges. What our parents and grandparents put up with or had strategies to deal with, we find it really difficult to cope with… I have to say that I do hear a lot of grumbles about stress and pressure and burnout… and I do sometimes wonder where is the cutting edge, where is the resilience and stamina, where is that stickability which I learnt years ago from my training incumbent when I was a young curate¹. God never promises us an easy journey in carpet slippers but the way of a cross.…”
The Rt Rev’d. David Bentley, Gloucester Diocesan News, February 2002.

The Bishop of Gloucester swiftly retracted his words. Sort of. In the following month’s Diocesan newsletter he wrote “The last thing I want to do is to cause offence, particularly to clergy or their families, and, if I did so, I am very sorry.” The Bishop’s spokesman, John Horan, underlined his boss’s apology. Sort of: “Some people agreed wholeheartedly with what Bishop David said in his article, and applauded him for saying it; others felt offended. The Bishop’s response was to apologise for causing any offence.”² This is a mealy-mouthed sort of apology: I am sorry that people were offended: the substance of my caricature remains.

It is all very curious, because the Bishop of Gloucester, as a member of the House of Bishops, had commissioned a report in 2000 on the Church’s healing ministry, A Time to Heal. When it was published, all the publicity concentrated on the (small) section on the Church’s ministry of deliverance (exorcism, as the papers described it). Overlooked was the section on the effect of providing long-term, unrelieved, pastoral and practical care. The context was not parochial ministry, but there are hints that this may have been a sub-text. The report described the process of burnout, following, although not crediting the work of either Herbert Freudenberger, who first coined the term “burnout” in 1973, or Christine Maslach, whose work was the first qualitative analysis of the phenomenon³).

It is important to note that ‘burnout’, however we write it, is not an invention of the late twentieth century, a sign of our decadent modern times. A collection of poems published in 1599, and attributed to William Shakespeare, contains this couplet:

She burnt with love, as straw with fire flameth,
She burnt out love, as soon as straw out burneth.⁴

Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, records ‘burn oneself out’ as late nineteenth century slang meaning “to work too hard and die early”⁵. Graham Greene wrote a novel in 1960, A Burnt-Out Case, in which the architect Querry’s attack of ennui and indifference is likened to the hopeless lepers by the doctor of the leper village in the Congo: “You heard what the doctor called me just now— one of the burnt-out cases. They are the lepers who lose everything that can be eaten away before they are cured.”⁶

Herbert Freudenberger, an idealistic psychiatrist, who worked in both private practice and the free clinics of Manhattan, first applied the expression to a psychological phenomenon in an article in Psychotherapy in 1973⁷: “Some years ago, a few of us who had been working intensively in the free clinic movement began to talk of a concept which we referred to as ‘burn-out’.” He began to spell out the implications of the syndrome in The Journal of Social Issues the following year⁸. From the first, Freudenberger’s analysis was based upon the character traits his patients had in common. Those most likely to burn out were:

… idealists, perfectionists, and compulsives. These individuals were said to suffer from narcissistic disturbance, low self-esteem, childhood difficulties in development, high idealism, and Type-A personality⁹.¹⁰

Burnout was limited to those who exhibited “dynamic, charismatic, goal-oriented men or women or to determined idealists.”¹¹

For Freudenberger, driven and successful people lose sight of their “real selves”, the shadow side of their personalities, for whom the drivenness and compulsion to succeed is an unconscious attempt to placate basic psychological needs left unfulfilled by damage in childhood. The burnout candidate has a strongly idealised picture of themselves and using coping strategies to bridge the gap between image and reality. Those coping strategies, disengagement, distancing, dullness, deadness, ironically lead to greater stress, until their emotional resources are utterly depleted. They are burnt out.

Freudenberger’s idea struck a chord, and from the late 1970s and through the 1980s book after book began to describe the phenomenon. However, work based closely upon Freudenberger suffered from his initial lack of “a coherent psychological explanation of burnout… [and] his rather loosely formulated principles”¹². In the end, “the blurred, all-encompassing meaning of burnout and the unempirical nature of [Freudenberger’s] clinical approach led academic critics to disparage the concept of burnout or even dismiss it entirely.”¹³

The clinical discovery of burnout was given intellectual and empirical credibility by the social psychologist Christina Maslach, in the face of much resistance. When she and her collaborator, Susan Jackson, submitted their psychometric test for burnout to an academic journal it was returned with the words “we don’t do pop psychology”. Despite this initial reception, the Maslach Burnout Inventory has gone on to become the standard measurement of burnout.

Maslach defines burnout as “a response to the chronic emotional strain of dealing extensively with other human beings, particularly when they are troubled or having problems.” It is can be recognized in three separate areas of a person’s normal emotional functioning: someone suffering from burnout experiences “emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and [a sense of] reduced personal accomplishment”¹⁴. Maslach believed that anybody who did “people-work” was susceptible to burnout, and she included ministers of religion among her broad range of occupations.

But there may remain some who question, with the Bishop of Gloucester, the fact that burnout still seems to be a modern phenomenon. No number of allusions found in Shakespeare’s poems, or Graham Greene’s novels, will satisfy the suspicion that somehow we live in weaker, milquetoast, days.

Schaufeli and Enzmann in The Burnout Companion list seven possible causes for the increased presence of burnout in our culture¹⁵. First, a much greater proportion of the population earn their living through “people-work”. In the European Union the proportions vary from a high of 69% in the Netherlands; even in the mainly poorer and agricultural in Portugal 50% of the population work in the service sector. More people working in people-work means that more people are exposed to the problems of people-work. Second, there has been a change in our culture which allows psychological problems to be labelled: think of the “true-life” articles in newspapers and tabloid magazines which describe the difficulties an individual faced with a particular problem, and grateful and relieved they were when the problem was given a name and a status in the eyes of physicians or psychologists. Third, at the same time our culture has eroded the communitarian structures of the past in favour of allowing (making?) individuals define their own roles and status. We live in “a narcissistic culture that is characterised by the increasingly transient, unrewarding, and even combative nature of social relationships.”¹⁶ This ‘individualisation’ leads to greater emotional and psychological frustration, for which people are less equipped to deal, a “perfect recipe for burnout”.

Fourth, changes in methods of working, with the increased presence of advanced technology and at the same time combined with increased competition for the attention of consumers means that modern people-workers are required to do two non-complementary tasks: highly advanced cognitive duties and unlimited “emotional labour” in keeping customers or clients happy. In the past it was enough to do the job; now the job has to be done with sympathy. For example, in the past a proper attitude for a nurse would be to be “responsible, orderly, tidy, neat, prudent, industrious, disciplined and sensible. Nowadays, nurses are [also] expected to be empathic, giving and in tune with the emotional lives of their patients.”¹⁷

People expect more from their people-worker than before, and sometimes the expectation is unreasonable:

A young businessman said to a flight attendant, ‘Why aren’t you smiling?’ She put her tray on the food cart… and said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You smile first, then I’ll smile.’ The businessman smiled at her. ‘Good,’ she replied. ‘Now freeze, and hold that for fifteen hours.’¹⁸

(Fifteen hours is a short shift for workers in the Cult of Nice.)

Fifth, at the same time, there has been a weakening of professional authority for all professions, and not just the clerical. Professional bodies, from the 1970s onwards, were thought to be more concerned with protecting their vested interests than in serving their clients. Unhappily, some actions by professional bodies have confirmed this suspicion: think of the public reaction to the Roman Catholic Church’s decision in the 1980s and early 1990s to move priests accused of sexual abuse, rather than report them to the police.

The weakening of professional authority is connected to our sixth factor, the interaction of the people-worker, their clients and “professional mystique”. This is the expectation, implicit, unspoken, in the minds of the clients about how the people-worker will behave or even think. If there is a shortfall between mystique and actuality, then stress will increase. The mystique can even operate upon the people-worker directly. There may be, for example, a very strong assumption that a priest’s day-to-day work will largely consist of ‘being alongside’ those in need. What happens when administration, filing, or form-filling becomes routine?

The seventh and final factor is what Schaufeli and Enzmann call the “changed psychological contract”. This is the belief that a people-worker, an employee of a particular organisation, might have about the reciprocal exchange of work and value: “I will do this work in these hours for you, and in exchange you will provide me with a wage/status/stability”. This is something more than the written contract of employment; it operates again, in the implicit and unspoken assumptions people make. The psychological contract always lags behind the employment contract: people-workers will be labouring under the terms of the one, whilst simultaneously working under the assumptions of the other. What will happen when the new Terms of Service legislation is implemented in the Church of England¹⁹? How long will it be before the changed psychological contract ceases to be a factor in individual clergy’s stressing?

Given these factors in the increased prevalence of burnout in our culture, what can we say about the manifestation of the syndrome? How does it appear in a burning- or burnt-out individual? Time to Heal gives us a process, and in doing so, clearly follows the lead of Freudenberger and the clinical approach, with a concentration on the personal causes of burnout. The “reason”, if not the “blame”, for burnout comes from the individual’s inability properly to integrate emotional needs and professional demands. Whereas Freudenberger’s work gives twelve stages to the burnout cycle, Time to Heal succinctly reduces them to three. The first stage is a simple “imbalance between the demands of work and personal resources”. The carer works longer hours, probably longer hours than strictly necessary for completing obligatory tasks, and personal time is squeezed. You eat meals in a hurry, and reduce time spent with family and friends. You may begin to experience physical symptoms, such as altered sleep patterns, especially in getting to sleep, or niggling colds or cold sores. At this point it is important to prevent this pattern of destructive behaviour worsening; find time “to stake stock, seek God and the advice of those around us…”.

It is rare that a carer, experiencing burnout for the first time, is actually able to do this. You need to have some explanation for what is happening to you, but human psychology means that the explanation usually doesn’t take into account any complexity in the situation in which you find yourself. The simplest, most obvious, explanation is a personal one. Maslach calls this the mea culpa response: “I am incapable of handling what everyone else can”. It is a result of “pluralistic ignorance”: if you live with a reduced level of emotional functioning, then you will be unable accurately to judge the cloaked thoughts and emotions of other people. They become opaque, and you begin to think that you are the only person who feels this way. “I am collapsing under the strain, but when my colleagues say they are coping that is because they really are coping. My failure to cope, to be like them, is a sign of my unique moral weakness”. Maslach gives an example of a nurse’s reaction to the chronic stress of medical care:

“While we were in training, we were always being told to ‘be professional.’ No one ever said exactly what ‘professional’ meant, or how to be that way, but I guess we all figured out that it meant being cool, calm, objective— and not easily rattled by things. But I did get rattled and upset at times… and I would be panicky and angry and sad… Everyone else seemed to be handling things OK, which made me feel worse— like a real failure and a weakling who wasn’t cut out for this kind of work.”²⁰

Unhappily, by the time you have reached this position, with emotions and judgement impaired, you will be rapidly entering stage two.

Here, increasing and intolerable stress is expressed in your behaviour to those around you: “angry outbursts, irritability, feeling tired all the time and anxiety about physical health.” Although Time to Heal doesn’t mention it, this is often a stage in which the stressed carer begins to self-medicate, with food (comfort eating), or alcohol (comfort drinking) or non-prescription drugs. You begin to use a different explanation to explain what is happening to you: you blame. Blaming forces you to become emotionally detached from those for whom you are caring; it provides a simple, tangible explanation for the emotional dysfunction of burnout, caused, in reality, by a chronic tangle of socio-economic, pastoral, and theological factors. The tangle cannot be easily described in concrete terms, for, as Maslach puts it, “it has no specific boundaries in time and space”²¹. Blaming the person with the difficult pastoral problem, the person for whom you care, allows you to comprehend what is happening to you: “Why should I behave compassionately towards people like them? They have brought their problems on themselves.”

The third stage is, grimly called, “terminal burn-out”. Here you find it impossible to re-calibrate the balance between what is (perceived to be) demanded of you and the resources you have to offer. “He or she goes into overdrive, works mechanically, by the book, lacking the fresh inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They tend to be late for appointments and to refer to those they are caring for in a derogatory manner, using superficial, stereotyped, authoritarian methods of communication.”²² That’s how it appears to those outside you; inside it is much worse:

On an emotional level, the carer becomes exhausted, incapable of empathy and overwhelmed by everyday problems… Persons in this situation put themselves down, feel discouraged and wonder how they ever achieved in the past. Problems pile up and paralyse the mind. Disorganization results in more precious energy being expended to make up for lost efficiency. Fatigue deepens and thought processes slow. Physically, an inner tension, an aching across the chest, weakness, headaches, indigestion and a lack of sleep are often experienced.²³

This is a hateful and wasteful condition for anybody to find themselves in; hateful because it stirs up many emotions focussed around (self-)loathing, and wasteful because of the sheer amount of physical and emotional energy which it eats up.

But is it sufficient to find the causes of burnout in the sufferers’ personalities and psychological makeup? It certainly lets the organizations in which sufferers work off the hook; they can’t be held responsible for an individual’s failings. Furthermore, the clinical approach paradoxically applies another layer of stressing upon the sufferer: if burnout only happens to dynamic, charismatic and successful people, then my burnout and my suffering is somehow an achievement, a badge of status. It shows that I have reached the levels of omni-competence and drive denied to lesser mortals.

But Maslach, on the other hand, emphasises the structural causes of burnout. In her analysis, burnout is neither something just “happening in the mind”, nor is it evidence of moral feebleness, theological vagueness, or vocational weakness. For Maslach burnout is less the result of the individual’s incapacity for stress than it is the product of an organization’s structural stressing:

Although personality does play some part in burnout, the bulk of evidence I have examined is consistent with the view that burnout is best understood (and modified) in terms of situational sources of job-related, interpersonal stress. The phenomenon is so widespread, the people affected by it are so numerous, and their personalities and backgrounds are so varied, that it does not make sense to identify “bad people” as the cause for what is clearly an undesirable outcome. Rather, we should be trying to identify and analyze the critical components of “bad” situations in which many good people function.²⁴

To put it another, Wildean, way: to lose one cleric to stress may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose many looks like carelessness.

This is where burnout in clergy has another, externally-imposed, factor. Burnout in clergy can become spiritualized, that is, burnout may be treated as a problem that can be solved by the application of the correct spiritual, theological or biblical nostrum. BALM²⁵, whose main work is to do with bullying in parochial ministry, says this about deficiencies of the spiritualizing approach:

Nevertheless, it is not unusual for well-meaning Christians to focus only on the spiritual aspects of the problem. Often the approach is very judgmental— “You are anxious, where is your confidence in Christ?”, “You are depressed, where is your joy in the Lord?”, “You are stressed, you need to pray for God’s peace”. Judgement followed by prescription – and often backed up with Bible verses to strengthen the message. And all this with very little understanding of what psychiatric injuries really are!

What happens? The wounded Christian feels guilty and begins to question if everything that has happened to them is in reality their own fault, and down to their own spiritual failure – a destructive process that is easily helped along by further “spiritualising” of the problems. Guilt feelings can very easily be induced in damaged, vulnerable people and doing so, even unintentionally, can (and probably should) be considered as a form of spiritual abuse. Feeling guilty is not the same as being guilty— but the damaged Christian may be unable to tell the difference.²⁶

This does not mean that burnout has no spiritual causes, and neither does it mean that it doesn’t have spiritual consequences. Douglas Turton and Leslie Francis have mapped the relationship between a healthy prayer life and resistance to burnout: “the empirical evidence suggests that people who pray enjoy a range of psychological benefits, including a greater sense of purpose in life, a higher level of satisfaction with life, and better psychological well-being”²⁷. However, as we have seen in the stages of the burnout cycle above, taking time for something as non-concrete as prayer, in a world in which meaning is supplied by results, is a hard thing to do when maladaptive behaviours are being reinforced in the burning-out parson:

Clergy work-related poor psychological health, stress, and burnout pose an increasingly serious problem for the leaders of denominations throughout the world, as the particular circumstances related to spiritual and religious leadership in the community have a special and unique dynamic. The Christian church, like most religions, has the unenviable task of looking back to its roots, living in the present with the constant changes associated with a modern community, and looking forward with eschatological confidence and hope, all at the same time. Combined with the sense of urgency attached to the church’s mission, clergy and church leaders frequently become the victim of their own humanity and frailty. The challenge for researchers is to understand the nature of the problem in order to develop effective support and therapeutic strategies.²⁸

This is the purpose of the remainder of this series.

1. This incumbent was Michael Hocking, the author of a whole series of parson’s handbooks (A handbook of parish work, A handbook of pastoral work, The parish seeks the way), none of which mentions “stress and pressure and burnout”. [↩]
2. ‘Bishop regrets attack on softies’, Church Times, (No. 7254), 8 March, 2002. [↩]
3. There is intriguing evidence of conceptual development in the changing orthography of the term “burnout”. It began as two separate words, “burn out”, with quotation marks around them, showing that it was a metaphor, taken from the physical process of burning an object, such as a match. It then morphed into a hyphenated word, “burn-out”, sometimes with and sometimes without the quotation marks. This showed that it was changing from a metaphor into an objective concept; there was only one possible direction of burn, and that was “out”. The diagnosis does not yet appear in the handbook of the American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (version IV, published in 1994, contains 297 disorders), but when it does it will be as Burnout, with proper noun capitalization, to show it has become an objective reality. (Disappointingly, although burnout has achieved official status in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), as disease Z73.0, it is as “Burn-out: State of vital exhaustion”. Which spoils the theory, somewhat. [↩]
4. William Shakespeare (?), Poems from The Passionate Pilgrim, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds.), The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 780. [↩]
5. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English [5th ed.] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), Vol. 1, p. 111. Partridge records this meaning has having become standard English by 1900. [↩]
6. Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case, (London: Penguin Classics, 1992 [1960]), p. 110. [↩]
7. Psychotherapy, Vol XII/1 (1973). [↩]
8. Herbert Freudenberger, ‘Staff burnout’, Journal of Social Issues, Vol 30/1 (1974), pp. 159-165. [↩]
9. A personality type first described by two cardiologists, Friedman and Rosenham, in the 1950s. Type-A personalities were susceptible to increased chances of coronary disease through a pattern of panicky behaviour, worry about status and time keeping, and highly developed sense of competition. Type-As are sometimes, cruelly, called “stress junkies”. [↩]
10. William N. Grosch and David C. Olsen, ‘Clergy Burnout: An Integrative Approach’, in JCLP/In Session: Psychotherapy in Practice, Vol. 56/5, 2000, p. 620. [↩]
11. Herbert J. Freudenberger and Geraldine Richelson, Burn-out: the High Cost of High Achievement, (Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press, 1980), p. 22. [↩]
12. Wilmar Schaufeli and Dirk Enzmann, The Burnout Companion to Study and Practice: A Critical Analysis (Issues in Occupational Health Series), (London: Taylor & Francis, 1998), p. 102. [↩]
13. Schaufeli and Enzmann, Burnout Companion, p. 6. [↩]
14. Christina Maslach, Burnout: the cost of caring (Cambridge, MA : Malor Books, 2003), p. 2. [↩]
15. Schaufeli and Enzmann, Burnout Companion, pp. 12–17. [↩]
16. Schaufeli and Enzmann, Burnout Companion, p. 13. [↩]
17. Schaufeli and Enzmann, Burnout Companion, p. 15. [↩]
18. Schaufeli and Enzmann, Burnout Companion, p. 14. [↩]
19. Draft Ecclesiastical Offices (Terms of Service) Legislation (GS1637-9X), a report presented to General Synod in February 2007. [↩]
20. Maslach, Burnout, p. 18. [↩]
21. Maslach, Burnout, p. 20. [↩]
22. Time to Heal, p. 147. [↩]
23. Time to Heal, p. 147. [↩]
24. Maslach, Burnout, p. 14. [↩]
25. “Bullied and Abused Lives in Ministry” : <www.balmnet.co.uk>. [↩]
26. BALM : ‘Bullying and Spirituality’, Available online from <www.balmnet.co.uk/spirituality.htm.>. Accessed 20 August 2007. Emphasis in the original. [↩]
27. Douglas W. Turton and Leslie J. Francis, ‘The relationship between attitude toward prayer and professional burnout among Anglican parochial clergy in England: Are praying clergy healthier clergy?’, in Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Vol 10/1 (2007), p. 70. [↩]
28. Christopher Lewis, et al., ‘Clergy work-related psychological health, stress, and burnout: an introduction’ in Mental Health, Religion & Culture, Vol 10/1 (2007), p. 2. [↩]