ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a guide to the skills and necessity of clinical reasoning to ensure a more accurate diagnosis of burnout as against other physical and psychological conditions. Clinical reasoning thus helps to assess symptoms and to construct a clinical profile weighing up alternative physical and psychological diagnoses. The concept of ‘burnout’ is still being delineated, so the score on a burnout measure is only the first step in investigating whether burnout is present or not. Measures of burnout at best have high ‘sensitivity’ (i.e. they pick ‘true’ cases of burnout with high accuracy) but have lower levels of ‘specificity’ (i.e. they can generate ‘false positive’ diagnoses of burnout). As stress-related psychological conditions often present as ‘fuzzy set’ patterns, and there may also be co-morbidity with another condition, diagnosis requires skilled clinical reasoning by the assessing health practitioner and the sufferer to confirm the certainty of burnout and differentiate it from other disorders with symptoms in common such as chronic fatigue syndrome, exhaustion, anxiety, adjustment disorder and depression.
