An illustrated booklet designed to help people talk about burnout and related feelings of stress and fatigue has been published by modern language scholars.
The Burnout Booklet: A Health Resource for Patients and Practitioners draws from the real experiences of those who have dealt with these conditions and aims to provide new and creative ways of thinking and communicating about them.
In doing so, the authors at the University of Exeter hope it will provide a valuable resource for GPs and mental health charities to support people with physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.
The stories have been gathered through the Reading Bodies research project, which is led by academics in the University's Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies.
"The language we use to describe health symptoms and conditions is often shaped by social and cultural factors," says Professor Katharine Murphy, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, and the project's lead. "Through Reading Bodies, we have been considering the value of literature for both communicating and challenging existing understanding of a range of health conditions, past and present. This booklet takes things one step further - drawing from the creative outputs of participants to produce a resource for practitioners and patients alike."
Reading Bodies, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has focused on the interconnections between literature and medicine, and in particular, cultural narratives of illness in Europe from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As part of this, Professor Murphy has been studying 'neurasthenia', a late 19th-century term used to describe nervous exhaustion and sometimes interpreted as a precursor to contemporary concepts of burnout.
This inspired the team to hold a creative workshop for members of the public, from which they developed an anthology of writing and illustrations around burnout. Contributors, who included established authors and people writing for the first time, as well as health professionals and educators, not only submitted creative pieces but also completed a survey in which they talked about their own experiences.
"We amassed a significant amount of data and insight during the production of the anthology on the language used to explain feelings of burnout, and we soon realised we had the opportunity to develop it into a resource for health professionals," says Dr Olivia Glaze, Postdoctoral Research Associate. "Our hope is that it will help people to tell their own stories about illness and to develop strategies for personal resilience."
The contributions have been anonymised and arranged into themes, including 'Running', 'Invisibility' and 'Birds'. Concerning the first of these, one adapted passage reads:
"Burnout felt like constantly running - with no break, no finish line, just endless pressure to keep going. But learning to set boundaries, share how I was feeling, and take small breaks - especially outside in green spaces - helped me remember that it's okay to stop and catch your breath."
Another combined quote, on a theme of 'Cracks', reads: "I had paper-thin patience - every little thing got to me, and tears were always close to the surface. My emotions started leaking through the cracks, and I couldn't keep it together. I learned that letting those cracks show and talking about what was really going on was the first step to healing. Having a cup of tea with someone, spending time in calming places, this helped the cracks slowly mend."
The booklet has been designed and illustrated by Hannah Mumby, a Devon-based artist with a particular interest in mental health and drawing nuances out of language and bringing them to life through illustration.
The team will now begin speaking to health authorities, government departments and voluntary organisations in an effort to share the booklet more widely.
"We hope it will support patients when they are looking for the words to express their experiences of burnout," adds Professor Murphy. "For medical practitioners, it is about supporting better identification of burnout. And we wanted to make it clear that burnout can present itself in spaces other than the workplace, such as for those in care-related circumstances and more generally in our personal lives."
