Burnout in mental health professionals and its relation with their attitudes towards mental illness

Background and objectives

Staff burnout is a concern in the mental health field, in terms of its prevalence and its association with a range of undesirable outcomes. Recent research suggests there is a relationship between mental health professionals’ (MHPs) burnout and stigmatizing attitudes towards their patients, probably leading to deleterious effects on the quality of their care. We measured burnout in a sample of professionals working in a wide range of mental health facilities in Spain, Portugal and Italy, and analyzed (1) its relationship with a set of relevant sociodemographic variables and (2) its influence on their stigmatizing attitudes.

Methods

We administered a survey including the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and two questionnaires related to stigmatizing attitudes: The Community Attitudes towards the Mentally Ill (CAMI) and the Attribution Questionnaire (AQ-27). Sociodemographics including information on profession, work setting and country were also registered.

Results

1525 professionals of the surveyed population (34.06 %) completed the survey. Burnout scores were significantly related to many of the sociodemographic variables. Profession and country were the strongest and most consistently associated to the three dimensions of burnout (i.e., Emotional Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (Dp) and Personal Achievement (PA)) always with a p < 0.001. Fittings of linear models predicting stigmatizing attitudes from burnout pointed to PA as the most influential variable, being statistically significant for 11 of the 13 stigma variables, followed by both EE and Dp which were significant for 6 of the variables. Finally, higher adjusted R2 from the fitted models showed that burnout was more influential than profession, work setting or country in many of the stigma variables including Anger, Dangerousness, Fear, Help, Restrictiveness and Ideology.

Conclusion

Results from this study indicate that burnout of MHPs is related to a wide range of sociodemographic factors, with profession and country being remarkably significant. MHPs reporting higher burnout (especially lower personal achievement at work) have more negative attitudes towards their patients and support more coercive and restrictive approaches in their care. Staff burnout seems to explain most of their stigmatizing attitudes more than personal and professional variables. Thus, interventions to diminish burnout might have a positive influence on mental health care. Future studies should include organizational variables, more specific scales for stigma in MHPs, and have a follow-up design.