Abstract
Recent studies have documented the high prevalence of burnout among medicine and dentistry students, with potentially catastrophic consequences for both students and patients. Both environmental and personality factors play a part in burnout; perfectionism, a common trait in medicine students’ personalities, has been linked to psychological distress and increasing students’ vulnerability to burnout. Self-compassion, i.e., treating oneself kindly through hardship, has recently emerged as a buffer between perfectionism and psychological distress. While using a novel three-factor conceptualization of perfectionism (BIG3), this study aims to analyze if self-compassion has a protective role in the relationship between perfectionism and burnout, in a sample of medicine and dentistry students, through mediation analysis. We found that self-compassion significantly mediated the relationship between all three forms of perfectionism and burnout: as a partial mediator in self-critical and rigid perfectionism, as well as a full mediator in narcissistic perfectionism. Our findings underline self-compassion’s relevance in burnout prevention and management, supporting its use as an intervention target in burnout reduction programs and strategies.
Highlights
Burnout is a psychological syndrome that occurs following a prolonged period of intense stress, related to work and/or study, which results in a depletion of emotional and physical resources [1]
Freudenberger [3] and includes three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of achievement
The mean comparison of all the variables by gender revealed that women had significantly higher levels of self-critical perfectionism (57.94 ± 14.28 vs. 52.58 ± 12.78, t = −3.312, p = 0.001) and significantly lower levels of self-compassion (2.87 ± 0.70 vs. 3.05 ± 0.74, t = 2.196, p = 0.029)
Summary
Burnout is a psychological syndrome that occurs following a prolonged period of intense stress, related to work and/or study, which results in a depletion of emotional and physical resources [1]. Freudenberger [3] and includes three components: emotional exhaustion (which refers to feelings of emotional resources being depleted and represents the stress dimension of burnout), depersonalization (or cynicism) (which represents the interpersonal dimension of burnout), and feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of achievement (that represents the self-evaluation dimension of burnout). It occurs at all stages of medical education and career [4] and is increasingly recognized as a public health and social problem, due to its high prevalence and negative impact on personal health, patient care, and economic costs [5]. Burnout symptoms and consequences increase from pre- to postgraduate medical education, reaching their peak in the residency [7].
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