Burnout Is On The Rise How Do We Deal With It?

Chronic stress is linked to leading causes of death, including heart disease and suicide, and cases of burnout are rising with frightening speed. It’s time to unpack this misunderstood, stigmatised and life-threatening mental-health pandemic.

- Robyn Maclarty

The signs were there right from the start. After two months in the job my face broke out in sores: impetigo, caused by stress. Then came a series of paralysing neck spasms. There were periods of thriving, thinking, I’ve got this! Only to be plunged back into a Sisyphean cycle of trying harder yet somehow feeling even more of a failure. People were retrenched; the workload trebled. Then again. Then again. The company made concessions for an ever more demanding client, and the workload just kept growing. What did I do to cope? I took on even more work to show I was up to the task (I wasn’t).

Then one day I started sobbing at my desk for no apparent reason and I couldn’t stop. The urge to flee the building overwhelmed me but I resisted the urge, knowing that if I did flee I would not return.

I looked at other jobs. They all seemed like more of the same.

I began to realise that something was wrong, something I didn’t fully understand. I took some measures (hired a brilliant coach and took her advice), which helped, but the problem was still there and I couldn’t see past it: the job. Increasingly, every day was infused with dread, hopelessness and overwhelm.

Then lockdown came and the company I worked for went into crisis mode, its clients went into crisis mode, and for the first time ever my brain offered suicide as a perfectly logical solution. Then it offered it again, and again. It felt as though an alien was thinking my thoughts. Horrified, I realised I was going to have to do the unthinkable before I did the irreversible: quit my job. So I did.

THE NUMBERS

‘The figures are shocking,’ says Christi Pieterse, director of Raviver Stress and Burnout Centre in Mbombela, Mpumalanga. ‘