Society's Load-Bearing Walls Are Human. They're Starting to Buckle.
Kristen Lee
Behavioral scientist, award-winning educator, author, and keynote speaker relentlessly devoted to creating environments that optimize talent and inspire collective efficacy
If walls could speak, health and social impact professionals would say they shouldn’t be treated as an infinite resource
I’m eighteen. It’s time to find a summer job and I’m too old to scoop ice cream anymore. My illustrious options include Sunoco or Papa Gino’s—and I'm really not great with all those register buttons. There’s always babysitting—but the smell of Cheerios nauseates me.
The newspaper clipping came in the nick of time. Courtesy of Mom’s kitchen scissors—surely now a certifiable family heirloom.
LIKE WORKING WITH KIDS? EXPERIENCE IN EDUCATION PREFERRED. Check check. $800 WEEKLY. Check! A bona fide fortune for a college student in the early nineties. No more scrapping for Friendly’s tuna melts and cone head sundaes. I was adulting before adulting was a thing.
The school had conveniently left off the part about twenty-four hour shifts and Mary Poppins meets Quentin Tarantino initiation. And that the “kids”—who were taller than me—thought it sport to harass any new staff with fraternity hazing velocity.
My boss had assured me it’d be a breeze driving through town—just turn on their favorite songs cruise in that new fifteen-passenger van. No mention of how many decibels and four-letter words involved.
It was twelve teenagers against three staff. Me-with an impressive nine months of 101 college classes in tow—you should’ve seen my copious Intro to Psychology notes. That, and a solid read of Go Ask Alice made me the ideal candidate. Sure, I was well prepared, I’d told them in my interview. I want to make a difference, I bellowed.?
The rest of my co-workers—I didn’t know the word colleague at the time- seemed at first more seasoned.?
After all, the administration vowed to provide “comprehensive training” and “ongoing support”. Which is really code for a binder with coffee and otherwise unidentifiable stains.?
It was filled with allegedly valuable protocol that almost never worked because there were somehow no mention on what to do when a fifteen-year old steals your keys and drives to the nearest drug house or how to remain calm when not just one but three of the kitchen knives go missing. The staff were unprepared and overwhelmed—the only solace was marginally decent coffee and a nearby Dairy Queen.
This insight—that none of us were properly supported- became real during what later simply became known as The Riot. When I infamously found my co-worker Janet huddled in fetal position clutching an empty Ativan bottle she thought no one would miss from the kids meds closet. From that moment on, I became the official person in charge given my quick reflex to call 9-1-1 and not join Janet’s little party. What fortune. After three shifts and some non-violent behavioral management classes that taught me to avoid getting bitten, I’d been promoted.
The kids had impeccable rioting skills—enough for them to get more than one feature in the local police log. And make a lot of staff buckle. Enough to make my parents beg me to quit—which was fair—it was my Dad’s Toyota they stole, not mine. Surely these kids were setting themselves up for a lucrative stunt work career. You should have seen the way they seamlessly screamed F-bombs, punched out windows, and took over the roof. Talk about multitasking. Hopefully those skills translated to something useful.?
I hadn’t known it at the time—while my friends lifeguarded and pumped gas that I was formulating a question that would define my life’s work. I was horrified watching the revolving door spin and spit unsuspecting staff-in and out, over and over. I thought it tragic that the very people brimming with compassion weren’t receiving any. They needed more than marginally good coffee and watery pep talks. Especially when those kids weren’t just angsty teenagers, but needed the kind of steady guidance and skill to help address their adverse childhood events and resulting emotional behavioral issues. Much like teachers and health care workers of today.?
While I haven’t had found any colleagues siphoning Ativan in their cubicle lately—though some would argue it as perfectly reasonable, I’m still filled with the same nagging questions since these formative professional experiences.?
Luckily, by now, I’ve been properly trained, and have spent thirty years chasing the question. I even got invited onto NPR to talk about burnout with Christina Maslach. My eighteen-year old self would be proud. Why? I wanted to know. Why is valuable work undervalued? Where’s the help for the helpers? Won’t this hurt their ability to to help?
Now my questions are a little more academically tuned—How can environments become more conducive to protecting workers? Can burnout be mitigated? What will it take to co-create healthier mental health cultures? These questions are a little more polished than eighteen-year old me, but still charged with the same emotional velocity felt watching my fellow co-workers languish with no help in sight. Why? We must keep asking these questions.?
When people holding up the walls of society are disparaged and barely left with the resources to care for themselves, the resulting collapses will be widely felt. Medical errors increase. Quality of care suffers. Patients and student outcomes become compromised.?
A couple weeks ago, I was given the honor of presenting a Grand Rounds lecture at Harvard Medical School on this very topic. For anyone in health and social impact professions—like nurses, doctor’s, psychologists, social workers, and teachers—there’s a disproportionate risk for it. It is a serious public health issue that begs collective attention and will. Human walls aren’t made of steel. And when they buckle, we all suffer.
Here are some of the points I raised:
Burnout is a thief.?
It robs of many things: zest, your why, and any semblance of peace. In many cases it affects physical health, our ability to enjoy anything at all. It’s considered a tridimensional process marked by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, cynicism, and decreased sense of accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion is the most common suffered amongst health and social impact professionals.
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Burnout isn’t a matter of personal failing or weakness.
Many tirelessly devoted practitioners are haunted by the pervasive, haunting question “Am I doing enough?”. My naming convention for this is “Underperformance Dysmorphic Disorder”. I doubt it will make it’s way into the DSM-5 anytime soon-but maybe it’s worth writing to the committee. Practitioners need to find a wider mirror that helps them see themselves within a context that breeds indisposition, rather than believing one is not meeting the mark, burdened with guilt and despair.
The risk of burnout is especially off the charts for health and social impact professionals.
Don’t count on staying well if you’re in the helping professions. When one’s vocation and ethos call them to a life of service to humanity, they often suffer inhumanely. Patronizing slogans minimize the problem—like being told to put your mask on first, even when there’s a critical shortage of masks, with no instructions on how to use them, or time to do so. Noble professions deserve more than trite slogans and forced martyrdom.
Burnout made headlines in 2019.?
You know it’s serious when the World Health Organization (WHO) makes the bold move of reclassifying burnout from a health condition to one as various aspects of how we are required to work or how the work environment itself adversely affect our wellbeing. In other words context matters. It hard to stay functional within dysfunction. I doubt that the WHO’s decision was? cavalier—ICD reclassifications aren’t impulsive, random whims. They are data-driven calls to action worth paying heed to.
Burnout incubates in human systems.
Working to address this takes courage and candor. The structures that demand human bearing walls have serious structural flaws. Social policies, if they continue to exist, must reflect a devotion to treating people who provide care with care,? not as infinite resources to burn through.
Burnout isn’t inevitable or insurmountable.?
Research has shown there are protective factors that can be leveraged—both by individuals and organizations to protect against it ravaging the very people it threatens. This starts, as most things do, by recognizing the problem and taking steps to prevent and mitigate its consequences.
Realistic recovery opportunities must be offered.?
Sure, we can’t all just toss our phones in the woods and go on a six month sabbatical. But shortening lunches, inflexible schedules, inhumane shifts, and expectations galore aren’t cited anywhere as contributing factors towards increased resilience. Constant load-bearing isn’t sustainable—especially given the critical shortage of skilled professionals.
Behavioral science has a lot to offer frayed systems and workers.?
These include applied approaches like reducing friction that makes work tasks cumbersome and inefficient. Then there are temporal landmarks—known as the “fresh start effect”, which can help ignite effective change approaches. Research has shown that devoting a set point in time to advance progress helps. And “commitment devices”—stating intention and holding each other accountable shows promise as a catalyst for change. (
Relationships can re-shape culture.
The literature offers some interesting caveats on this—that it’s not the classic supervisory set-up that matters most, but the informal networks developed inside and outside work that offer a daily help process to bolster resilience and inspire collective efficacy. Also, civility is underrated. Workplaces that encourage positive citizenry are more likely to flourish.
For over thirty years, I’ve seen a lot of crumbled walls. Every time I see fellow colleagues languish or leave—another support beam give way—my heart drops. We can’t treat human and social impact providers like infinite resources. People aren’t concrete.
If cultures and societies want better health, it seems reasonable to ask for better standards of care for the walls holding them up, lest we all run risk of getting crushed. The tacit expectation for professionals to take care of everyone but themselves is inhumane and illogical. Tired walls need more than a fresh coat of trendy paint. They need reinforcement to stand tall, and a closer look at the foundation in which their situated.
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3 个月Powerful read. “Burnout incubates in human systems…” this stood out as I’ve seen it in the clinical setting often. It lingers like a badge of honor, passed from one person to the next, until the entire system becomes overwhelmed. Teams unable to function at their highest capacity, left tattered and vulnerable yearning for something better.