Body Experience of Burnout-patients

Abstract

Background: The burnout syndrome has been the subject of numerous researches over the last decades, helping to analyze, identify and classify the spreading illness. This article aims to combine the selfreflected knowledge of Burnout-patients and scientific data. Furthermore, it will give a short overview of the topic body-experience, namely body image, body satisfaction and body differentiation and show how Burnout-patients stack up against healthy people in these areas. Method: To explore the topics of conception, satisfaction and level of differentiation, a Colour-a-Person- Dissatisfaction-Test (Koperbildmal test), is used to explore dysfunctions of the body experience. Setting: 83 Colour-a-Person-Dissatisfaction-Tests were carried out. 47 were conducted with patients, who were hospitalized at a clinic. The control group consisted of 36 participants, all working for the same company and diagnosed as “healthy” by the company’s occupational physician. Results: Results show a significant difference between Burnout-patients and the control group regarding the areas of body satisfaction and differentiation. Furthermore, it was useful to divide the Burnoutpatients into sub-categories and analyse their body conception in comparison to the fellow patients. The findings show how the levels of satisfaction and differentiation develop over the course of their hospitalization. Conclusion: Compared to Burnout-patients, the control group shows a higher level of satisfaction and differentiation, which leads to the conclusion that Burnout-patients not only suffer from emotional exhaustion, but that also their conception of their body is dysregulated. Similar pathologies are described with other diseases as well, e.g. anorexia nervosa, adiposity and bulimia nervosa. It can be assumed that the body image and the perception of the body of Burnout-patients are as dysregulated as the ones of patients with other psychological disturbances.