CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 141Stress and Burnout ResearchOccupational Health and BurnoutHealthcare professionals’ stress and burnout

A clinical perspective on burnout: diagnosis, classification, and treatment of clinical burnout

Open access
van Dam, Arno·2021·European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology
DOI 10.1080/1359432x.2021.1948400
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

In clinical psychology, burnout is regarded as a mental disorder assessed in patients who apply for psychological treatment and no longer work because of their symptoms or experience of serious problems in functioning at work. This definition of burnout is mostly referred to as ‘clinical burnout’. The purpose of this article is to provide insight into how clinicians in The Netherlands establish a diagnosis of clinical burnout and how they fit it in their classification systems. An outline is given on how psychological interventions for burnout are applied in therapies. The different phases in the treatment of clinical burnout – crisis, recovery, prevention, and post burnout growth, as well as their accompanying interventions are described. It may be relevant for work and organizational psychologists to realize that biological processes may play a role in the development of clinical burnout. For the physiology of stress, it does not matter whether the stress is work-related or the result of stress in private life or both. Central to understanding clinical burnout is the lack of recovery of the (physiological) stress system. It is also argued that the relevance of questionnaires, for detecting who is at serious health risk, is limited.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/1359432x.2021.1948400

Cites

84 of 84 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • ED is characterized by a debilitating state of exhaustion coupled with severe impairments in working memory and attention, and is considered the endstage of a severe burnout process that requires professional healthcare interventions.

    “ED is characterized by a debilitating state of exhaustion coupled with severe impairments in working memory and attention and is considered the endstage of a severe burnout process that requires professional healthcare interventions (Grossi et al., 2015; van Dam, 2021).”

    From Mediators during a Multimodal intervention for stress-induced exhaustion disorder (2024) · cites this paper as van Dam, 2021

    The Diagnosis and classification section says exhaustion disorder (ED) resembles clinical burnout, while the Chronic stress symptoms section reports exhaustion and impaired attention and working memory in clinical burnout. The paper describes clinical burnout as a late phase and outlines therapist-led treatment, but does not specifically say that ED entails *severe* working-memory and attention impairments or requires professional healthcare intervention. Page numbers are not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Carpenter, J. S., Iorfino, F., Cross, S. P., Davenport, T. A., Hermens, D. F., Rohleder, C., . . . Hickie, I. B. (2019). Combining clinical stage and patho- physiological mechanisms to understand illness trajectories in young people with emerging mood and psychotic syndromes. Medical Journal of Australia, 211, S12-22. https://www.innowell.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/03/Ch2-Nov-mechanisms-to-understand-illness.pdf
  2. ad · DOI
  3. Meijman, T. F., & Mulder, G. (1998). Psychological aspects of workload. In P. J. D. Drenth & H. Thierry (Eds.), Handbook of work and organiza- tional psychology, Volume 2: Work psychology (pp. 5-33). Psychology Press.
  4. Sanders, R. (2014). New evidence that chronic stress predisposes brain to mental illness (pp. 11). Berkeley News.
  5. Sterling, P. (2004). Principles of allostasis: Optimal design, predictive reg- ulation, pathophysiology and rational therapeutics. In J. Schulkin (red.). Allostasis, homeostasis and the costs of physiological adaptation. Cambridge University Press
  6. Van Dam, A., Keijsers, G. P. J., Eling, P. A. T. M., & Becker, E. S. (2015b). Burnout and impaired cognitive performance; review of evidence, underlying processes and future directions. In T. N. Winston (Ed.), Handbook on burnout and sleep deprivation: Risk factors, management strategies and impact on performance and behaviour (pp. 113-128). Nova Science Publishers.
  7. Van Dam, A., Keijsers, G. P. J., Kriens, S., Boelaars, V. A. J. M., & Vossen, C. J. C. (2017). Protocollaire behandeling van patiënten met somatisch- symptoomstoornis persisterend type met aanhoudende werkgerela- teerde vermoeidheidsklachten (burn-out). In G. P. J. Keijsers, A. van Minnen, A., M. J. P. M. Verbraak, C. A. L. Hoogduin, & P. M. G. Emmelkamp (Eds.), Protocollaire behandelingen voor volwassenen met psychische klachten 3 (pp. 63-146). Boom uitgevers.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
van Dam, A.
Affiliations
Tranzo Scientific Center for Care and Welfare, Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Venue
European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2021-07-14
Volume
30
Issue
5
Pages
732-741
ISSN
  • 1359-432X (ISSN-L)
  • 1464-0643
DOI
10.1080/1359432x.2021.1948400
OpenAlex
W3179381565
Cited by
134
References
84
Citations by year
2026: 29 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 1
FWCI
19.63
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • Research portal (Tilburg University) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Stress and Burnout Research
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Occupational Therapy › Occupational Health and Burnout
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Healthcare professionals’ stress and burnout
Keywords
burnout diagnosis, burnout recovery, burnout prevention, occupational stress, burnout questionnaire, health risk assessment

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review