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Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

The interesting comparison to me would be to study those people who exhibit the same symptoms (listlessness, short attention span, lack of work productivity) and compare their response to this study.

Do people who claim depression/other ills independent of burn-out score the same? It's unclear how the burn-out group was chosen.

Also, I'm concerned about establishing burn-out as a disease (as am I with most psychological diseases) because the victim mentality can set in pretty quick (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_therapy for interesting reading on this). "Sorry, I can't work today. I'm burned out. But you can't fire me. See, I have this disease. It's not my fault."

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Also, I'm concerned about establishing burn-out as a disease (as am I with most psychological diseases) because the victim mentality can set in pretty quick

Yes, kind of like how people with major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and a host of other psychological afflictions feel like victims.

Of course, they are. That the problems are mental is no reason to put these things any lower on the "serious" scale than physical problems.

I'm all for accuracy and debate when figuring out whether certain "diseases" are made up or not, but once there's clear evidence that something is real, to pretend that it's not just because some people might use it as an excuse is ridiculous and cruel. Sure, people might abuse this as an excuse, sort of like how they lie all the time about the stomach flu and dying grandmothers, but that doesn't change the seriousness of the situation (and the fact that you really can't work) when you actually have one of those things happen to you. And the solution is, as before, to sniff out bullshit and punish it, not reject wholesale what doctors are saying is a legitimate excuse.

Of course, this has only been a single article, this is certainly not as well established as most other psychological problems are, so the jury is still out, for sure.

No, they are not victims - they are patients. This "victims/non-victims" meme is just wrong, and it's toxic. Please don't spread it.

Last I checked, "victim" was the conventional term to apply to someone with a significant illness, e.g. "cholera victim." Patients are just the ones currently receiving medical attention for it.

The point is that, when dealing with people who's sense-of-self is pathologically affected, I suggest you steer away from the "victim" concept, because it is ideologically loaded. Whether depressive or not, people often want to think that they can "choose to not be a victim", which can be a very destructive idea for some. It's much more healthy to think in terms of "patient", because most people don't think that one can "choose to not be a patient".

You obviously have no idea how often and prominently thoughts like "I must not be a victim!" or "I must pull myself together" feature in the compulsive thought patterns of a depressive's experience, deepening the depressive state, especially if the person used to be very creative and productive. Seriously, please do not suggest to a clinically depressed person that they "just need to power through this" or something, because they are quiet likely to try, and they might end up killing themselves because it doesn't work. It's like persuading somebody with a broken leg to run a marathon, saying "Don't be such a wimp! No pain, no gain!".

"Victim or not" is simply in the wrong ballpark. A depressive person is a patient. Many of them have real trouble with accepting this fact, which is a symptom of their disease. If you're not depressive, you should have less problems understanding it. Please don't make it harder for them by pushing in the wrong direction.

"Sorry, I can't work today. I'm burned out. But you can't fire me. See, I have this disease. It's not my fault."

Unless I'm mistaken, this is more commonly referred to as "vacation".

It also seems problematic to use "visible on brain scans" as evidence that it's a disease. All mental activity takes place in the brain (there is no magical free-floating, non-physical "mind"), so any set of mental activity you choose to characterize can in principle be seen on brain scans, given good enough equipment.

The evidence seems to indicate that the electrical potentials are significantly lower, in other words, that there is a hard physical component to being burn-out.

I'm not sure that proves a "hard physical component" in the sense of which direction the causation goes. How else can mental activity take place except through some change in either electrical potentials, neurotransmitter release, physical configuration of the brain, or some other such "hard physical component"? There's really no other way for any mental characteristics to manifest themselves except through these physical mechanisms.

From what I know about it, and that's pretty limited, normally it is the frequency of excitation that determines neural activity, to find a lesser potential could indicate a chemical deficit of sorts.

So if this was just a psychological issue you would not expect to find this correlation with a physical value that is at first glance not directly related to the ability of the brain to think (which is the pre-requisite for being productive in the first place).

If thinking about stuff really is harder for people that are burned out because of an underlying physical cause it would explain a lot.

_delirium's contention is simply that all brain states (even those underlying "psychological issues") have physical bases and therefore we can (theoretically) measure them. The problem is that a set of brain states may have different "causes" -- and causation get's really tricky here but that's another story.

For example, the measured brain states associated with burn out could be do to a chemical deficiency (either in diet or genetic), or be because the person worked a long day at work, or perhaps could be a result of the person staying up very late playing video games. Most people would agree that the first is a disease state, but what about the second? The third?

Finally, with respect to their finding that burnout was associated with smaller potentials, assuming that they made their measurements using fMRI[1], then they were measuring changes in blood flow, which in turn are putatively reflective of the metabolic activity of nearby neurons, which in turn is putatively reflective of their frequency of excitation, averaged over some interval. There are circumstances where the magnitude of individual action potentials are affected, but I strongly doubt that is what they are talking about here, not the least because I don't see how they could measure it.

1. If they instead used EEG, I can make a similar argument that they are still measuring frequency of excitation.

Ok, that makes sense. But even if it does not rule it out there definitely is something going on here, which is why there will have to be some more study. The surprising thing to me is that they could find any evidence at all, instead of no differences between people with and without the burn-out symptoms.

After all for a variety of psychological disorders there is no objective difference between a 'healthy' and a 'diseased' brain that we can nail down, to find one in this instance is an indication that there might be some clear underlying cause.

As long as that cause has not been found it's somewhat speculative but my guess is that if they can nail it down so clearly that a cause will one day be found.

If you are producing 10 and suddenly you can't even produce 1, that's a burnout. If you been producing your whole life 0.5 and you need a solution based on the potential findings of this research as a diagnosis and an accompanying therapy, to stimulate your brain to produce 10, then maybe I understood what you meant.

Well, that was possible before as well. But now you we are underway to being able to diagnose it, and that includes being able to prove that you don't have it.

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