PROBLEMS OF PROFESSIONAL BURNOUT AMONG LAWYERS

Abstract

The problem of professional burnout has been in the center of numerous research for the last decades. Their results facilitated diagnosing the causes and consequences of this professional dysphoria. The majority of this research was focused on social occupations connected with intensive contacts with people. However, practicing lawyers who have a lot of social contacts by the nature of service and therefore especially suffer from burnout, have not been studied fully enough. The relevance of our study of this problem primarily lies in the need of further research of the professional burnout syndrome for its timely prevention and assistance to lawyers.
 The investigation of the professional burnout syndrome among that category of workers was carried out with the help of the MBI survey to determine the level of professional burnout according to the methods of Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson in adaptation of Natalia E. Vodopyanova based on the research of psychologists Charles Figley, Simon Philip Baron-Cohen, as well as Russian scholars. The respondents’ survey took place in the city of Vologda in February 2023 and the sampling population was more than 500 respondents.
 As a result the relationship of professional burnout with age and gender was determined. It turned out that working women are more prone to burnout than men, as they have additional emotional and physical burden connected with family chores. There is a description of depersonalization as a component of emotional burnout: inadequate attitude towards colleagues, irritability, loss of “idealism” and withdrawal into oneself. At the same time it was revealed that the impact of the psychological state of an individual employee on the whole team is insignificant. Specific recommendations for the prevention of the emotional burnout syndrome are suggested; the impact of professional burnout on the respondents’ general state of health was studied. Dependency of emotional burnout with empathy and features of the team are revealed. The most efficient ways of emotional burnout syndrome prevention are suggested. The results of the research can be used by psychologists who work with lawyers with emotional burnout symptoms and heads of organizations.