Abstract
Occupational stress and high workload are being increasingly recognized as significant contributors to the diseases and disorders constituting major components of the global burden of disease. A more detailed definition of burn-out was recently included by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) which reflects a growing acknowledgment of the role of professional work in mental health. One of the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder/anankastic personality disorder (OCPD/APD) is an undue preoccupation with productivity to the exclusion of pleasure and interpersonal relationships. This compulsive overworking is closely related to the concept of work addiction, and OCPD/APD was suggested to be its major risk factor. OCPD/APD is the most prevalent personality disorder and one that appears to produce the highest direct and indirect medical costs. At the same time, it is vastly understudied. In recent years, it has been repeatedly emphasized that it requires consistent conceptualization and clarification of its overlapping with similar conditions. Even though the limited existing studies suggest its strong relationship with burn-out and depression among employed individuals, there has been no systematic effort to investigate its role in the consequences of occupational stress and high workload. This paper identifies several substantial gaps in the current understanding of the relationships between work addiction, OCPD/APD, burn-out, and the global burden of disease within the context of the WHO’s plan of developing evidence-based guidelines on mental wellbeing in the workplace.
Highlights
Occupational stress and high workload are being increasingly recognized as significant contributors to the diseases and disorders constituting major components of the global burden of disease
While the World Health Organization (WHO) focuses on meso-level interventions in the workplace in order to reduce risks of burn-out, the present paper suggests that more attention needs to be devoted to
In recent studies on fairly large samples of working individuals in different countries, work addiction has been consistently related to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and more so than to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) [31,32]. This parallels some previous clinical observations based on hundreds of case reports which have distinguished different types of work addicts [29,33]. These findings suggest that work addiction, similar to other addictions, including substance-related ones, may be a result of initial behavioral coping mechanism to deal with some other underlying psychopathology, and it may be specific for particular disorders such as Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD)/anankastic personality disorder (APD) or ADHD
Summary
Occupational stress and high workload are being increasingly recognized as significant contributors to the diseases and disorders constituting major components of the global burden of disease. Burn-out is a potential mediator between OCPD/APD/work addiction, and other health problems such as CVD or substance abuse—with which burn-out, as well as long working hours, in general—have been previously associated [43,44,45,46,47] (the path between burn-out and other disorders is represented by a dashed line in Figure 1 because currently we do not have enough data to conclude whether burn-out is a separate clinical entity, a risk factor for [40], or a component of other diseases and disorders [41]) In this context, it appears that psychiatric work-related risk factors of non-communicable diseases, OCPD/APD and work addiction, are a substantial, mostly undeveloped area of research that awaits systematic studies and integration with the existing frameworks. The WHO’s objective to support people with mental disorders at work needs to account for the specificity of work addiction as a potential mental health problem
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
