ABSTRACT
Burnout was first described in greater detail by Herbert Freudenberger in the mid-1970s (Freudenberger, 1974). As an unpaid psychiatrist in a treatment center for drug addicts, he observed that young and idealistically motivated volunteers experi enced a gradual energy depletion and loss of moti vation and commitment, which was accompanied by a wide array of other mental and physical symptoms. Freudenberger labeled this particular state of exhaustion “ burnoutf a colloquial term used to refer to the devastating effects of chronic drug abuse. Independently, and at about the same time, Christina Maslach-a social psychological researcherstumbled across that very term in California. She studied the ways in which health care professionals cope with emotional arousal at work and observed that many of them were emotionally exhausted, had developed negative perceptions about their patients,
and experienced a crisis in their professional compe tence (Maslach & Schaufeli, 1993). In a way, the almost simultaneous discovery of burnout by the clinician Freudenberger and by the researcher Maslach marks the beginning of two different tradi tions that approach burnout from a practical and from a scientific point of view, respectively. So far, both traditions have developed relatively indepen dent from each other. Initially the clinical approach prevailed, which was supplemented by a more scien tific approach from the early 1980s, particularly after the introduction of a brief self-report questionnaire: the Maslach Burnout Inventory. By the turn of the century, approximately 6,000 scientific articles and books about burnout had appeared, and every year approximately 200 publications are added to this list. Most empirical studies were carried out in health care (34%) and in teaching (27%), with nurses (17%) as the most frequendy studied health profession, fol lowed by psychologists and psychotherapists (4%) and physicians (2%) (Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998; p. 69-73).
