Introduction – Burnout is today one of the main problem across french working society. While some specific jobs have been studied, mainly nurses or doctors, some haven’t been studied yet. I decided this year to focus on mental health of people working with people facing psychiatric trouble.
We know that every year, burnout cost loads of money (more than 5 millions euros according to Zawieja, 2015) and increase patient abuse (Manoukian, 2007). Moreover, we don’t have specific therapeutic protocols, mostly using the same as people facing depression. The main goal of this master thesis has been to understand the specificity of psychiatric staff burnout (psychologist, nurse, doctors, socialworkers) and how we can prevent it.
To study burnout, i’ve been focusing on a transdiagnostic processual approach, as a way to understand mental ilness based on processual alteration, without focusing on the trouble itself. In this study, I decided to work on emotion regulation and mental flexibility (ability to switch between thought depending of the situation). Those two concepts haven’t been studied in psychiatric staff burnout. My daily experiment as an intership in a french psychiatric hospital underlined difficulties workers are facing. The understading of those process could help us to understand the efficiency on a new therapy focusing on mental flexibility and values : The acceptance and commitment therapy also know as « ACT therapy » . It could be a innovative way to understand and treat burnout, especially with specific population.
Objectives – The main objective of this study has been to understand the specificity of psychiatric staff and care-givers burnout. Moreover, we’been looking for some risks and protectivs factors and their influence on each burnout dimension.
Hypothesis– We’ve been working on 4 hypothesis :
First one has been focusing on mental flexibility and emotion regulation focusing on the link connecting them.
Second one offers a correlation between emotional exhaustion and difficulties in emotion regulation among our population.
Third one ask the link between mental flexibility and the ability for our population to choose between a large range of emotion regulation strategies.
Finally, the last one, in a exploratory fashion, looks to understand the link between emotional clarity (the ability to understand your emotions and to name them) and dezhumanisation (burnout dimension).
Method / Tools / Statistics – To study this theme, I created a questionnary measuring Burn out levels (MBI-SS), Difficulties in Emotion regulation (Difficultiels in Emotion regulation scale) and Mental flexibility (Acceptance & Action Questionnaire – AAQ II). I gave that questionnary to 4 psychiatric hospital across Nantes (more than 100 workers) and got 38 answers back.
We’ve been using Jasp to treat those datas, focusing on correlation and multiple regression, and trying to build some predictivs models to prevent burnout as soon as possible.
Results – My statistics and correlation studies highlighted 2 main specificities of psychiatric staff burnout :
- “Typical Burnout” of medical professions and care-giver shows an impact on “emotional exhaustion” and “depersonnalisation” whereas Psychiatric staff burnout seems to have more impact on their own personal achievement.
- “Typical Burnout” in hospital underline difficulties to deal with emotionally strong situation as the main reason to experiment burnout. In our population, the main problem (thanks to linear multiple regression study) seems to be dissonance values between how psychiatric staff want to take care of their patients and how they really do.
Discussion – To help preventing Burnout and improve their daily professional life, we decided to focus on values for those people and help them to understand the meaning of their job. We think that burnout might be seen as “a weakness” in common thinking and close to “depression”in actual french hospital and ask for a specific therapeuticprotocol like Acceptance and commitment therapy. We need new studies to evaluate ACT therapy benefits among those people.
Conclusion – Working on a small sample, other studies has to be conducted to understand specificty of psychiatric staff burnout. The main goal is to underline the necessity to take care of people taking care of others.
Thanks to our study, we hope that psychiatric managers and directors will take a look at their salaries’s health.
Roman MALO – Master 2 PCPI
Key-words :
Emotionnal exhaustion : Épuisement émotionnel
Efficiency : L’efficience
Acceptance and Commitment therapy : Thérapie d’acceptation et d’engagement
The meaning : Le sens
Linear multiple regression (LMR) : Régression linéaire multiple