ABSTRACT
But what exactly is a breakdown? You won’t find ‘breakdown’ or ‘nervous breakdown’ in most medical
dictionaries, and these are not words that doctors write on sick notes. Instead, doctors’ notes speak of ‘nervous exhaustion,’ or ‘malaise’, ‘depression’, ‘stress’, ‘exhaustion’, ‘depressive illness’, ‘stress-related reaction’, ‘depressive stress’ . . . To the laywoman in the school staffroom struggling to understand why her colleague is in bed crying instead of tackling the Literacy Hour with Year 5 such phrases are of little help. They reveal very little about the painful experience of the sufferer. They are vague about causes, say nothing about likely outcomes and provide no guidelines that would help others to avoid a similar fate.
