Abstract
We examined the association of burnout with borderline personality (BP) traits in a study of 1,163 educational staff (80.9% women; mean age: 42.96). Because burnout has been found to overlap with depression, parallel analyses of burnout and depression were conducted. Burnout symptoms were assessed with the Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure, depressive symptoms with the PHQ-9, and BP traits with the Borderline Personality Questionnaire. Burnout was found to be associated with BP traits, controlling for neuroticism and history of depressive disorders. In women, burnout was linked to both the “affective insecurity” and the “impulsiveness” component of BP. In men, only the link between burnout and “affective insecurity” reached statistical significance. Compared to participants with “low” BP scores, participants with “high” BP scores reported more burnout symptoms, depressive symptoms, neuroticism, and occupational stress and less satisfaction with life. Disattenuated correlations between burnout and depression were close to 1, among both women (0.91) and men (0.94). The patterns of association of burnout and depression with the main study variables were similar, pointing to overlapping nomological networks. Burnout symptoms were only partly attributed to work by our participants. Our findings suggest that burnout is associated with BP traits through burnout-depression overlap.
Highlights
Burnout has been conceived of as a syndrome combining physical fatigue, cognitive weariness, and emotional exhaustion and resulting from chronic, unresolvable stress at work (Shirom and Melamed, 2006)
Burnout and depressive symptoms more strongly correlated with the “affective insecurity” component of Borderline personality (BP) than with its “impulsiveness” component
More detailed analyses, which distinguished between the two components of BP, revealed that burnout and depressive symptoms were associated with both “affective insecurity” and “impulsiveness” in women
Summary
Burnout has been conceived of as a syndrome combining physical fatigue, cognitive weariness, and emotional exhaustion and resulting from chronic, unresolvable stress at work (Shirom and Melamed, 2006). Burnout has been associated with a variety of adverse health outcomes, for instance, coronary heart disease (Toker et al, 2012). Not considered a nosological entity in the latest editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; APA, 2013) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10; World Health Organization, 2010), burnout has elicited growing interest among the psychology and the psychiatry community over the last decades. Depression, and Borderline Personality ideation/behaviors, affective instability (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria or anxiety), chronic feelings of emptiness, angry outbursts, and transient, stress-related paranoid thoughts or dissociative symptoms (Gunderson, 2011; APA, 2013). BP disorder has been found to have a prevalence of about 3–6% in the US general population—depending on the employed diagnostic algorithms—and to be associated with considerable mental and physical disability, especially among women (Grant et al, 2008; Trull et al, 2010)
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