"Does anyone still suffer from burnout?" a friend asked me recently: "You don't hear anything anymore." I promised him to research it.

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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The short answer: the impression is correct.

Burnout seems to be on the decline.

However, not much has been gained with this.

Because what does that mean?

It could actually mean that fewer people suffer from burnout because we have become more "resilient" overall.

It could also be that many or even more people still suffer from burnout, but doctors diagnose burnout less frequently or have found another, more fashionable term.

After all, it could be that the public attention, which is known to be very volatile, no longer wants to worry about burnout.

So in order.

First a definition and some statistics.

"Burnout" is defined by the World Health Organization as "workplace stress that employees are unable to cope with successfully".

Symptoms are lack of energy and exhaustion, an increasing mental distance, a negative attitude or cynicism towards one's own job, and reduced professional performance.

The diagnosis has only recently been officially included in the medical classification system.

Suffering itself, it seems to me, is ancient.

The Google Ngram Viewer, a search engine that combs through vast amounts of digitized books and which I like to use, identified a peak in burnout for German texts in 2011.

Before 1980, the term was practically non-existent.

It was more like depression.

We see the steepest increase in burnout in the years 2000 to 2011, since then the curve has been pointing downwards again.

The result coincides with data from the German company health insurance funds, which also report a high for 2011.

The number of cases has been falling for ten years.

The high point of burnout literature was a good ten years ago

In addition to the statistical evidence, there is literary evidence.

The literature on self-experience, in which more or less prominent people describe their burnout either educationally or exhibitionistically, also seems to be on the decline.

Either the burnout sufferers' urge to communicate is dwindling, or the publishers no longer see a market for the topic.

Here, too, the peak was a good ten years ago.

Back then, in 2010, for example, the book “Letter to my life” by the publicist Miriam Meckel was published.

Meckel's confession is typical of the genre.

A well-known woman, ambitious, successful at a young age, talks about how she breaks under her own perfectionism and that imposed on her by "society": "I had traveled the world for fifteen years, had worked, talked, written, acquired, represented until the doctor came.

I didn't set any limits, neither for myself nor for those around me, who sometimes demanded a lot and sucked me dry like a leech sucks its host.

And most of what I've done I've actually enjoyed.

But in all of this I couldn't find the Aristotelian middle between 'too much' and 'too little'.

Now I was suddenly shut down.” This is followed by a conversion experience in the style of Rilke's “You have to change your life” and the affirmation that you are now much closer to yourself.