A psychologist watching drug addicts' cigarettes burn down gave the name to his own collapse.
In the early 1970s, Herbert Freudenberger was a psychologist with a successful private practice on New York's Upper East Side. After hours, he volunteered at a free clinic on the Bowery, treating drug addicts.1 He worked twelve-hour days uptown, then headed downtown and worked until two in the morning. His daughter Lisa later recalled that he grew increasingly fatigued and irritable, that he stopped being pleasant to live with.
Watching his young clients sit in the clinic with blank faces, their cigarettes burning down to the filter, Freudenberger recognized something he was experiencing himself. He called it burnout.
In 1974, Freudenberger published "Staff Burn-Out" in the Journal of Social Issues, the first clinical description of the syndrome.2 He defined it as a state of physical and mental exhaustion caused by one's professional life. In 1980, he published Burn-Out: The High Cost of High Achievement, and the concept entered popular culture.3 He appeared on Oprah and Phil Donahue. Stressed-out professionals across the country recognized the description.
Social psychologist Christina Maslach developed the concept further, creating the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which identified three dimensions of the condition, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment, and became the most widely used measurement tool in burnout research.4
More than 140 definitions of burnout have been proposed in the academic literature.5 The condition is not classified as a standalone mental disorder in the DSM. In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, defining it as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
Freudenberger himself eventually found a way to manage his own burnout, though he never worked less. His daughter described a vacation where he got into a lake and did a dead man's float, then emerged grinning, asking her if she had seen him swimming. He died on November 29, 1999, having received the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology earlier that year.