ASWBMaster
Question of the week

Burnout

Ethical Principles and Responsibilities

The classic three-dimension model of burnout names emotional exhaustion, reduced personal accomplishment, and:

  1. Option A. Correct answer. depersonalisation, a cynical or detached response to clientsCorrect
  2. Option B. Incorrect answer. hyperarousal, a state of being constantly on the alert for danger
  3. Option C. Incorrect answer. intrusion, unwanted images of what a client has been through

Why

Maslach's model has three parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment. Depersonalisation is the cynical, detached, sometimes callous response to the people you serve, and describing clients by case number is the everyday version of it. B and C are real, and you will meet them in this topic, but they belong to secondary traumatic stress, whose symptoms mirror those of post-traumatic stress: intrusion, avoidance, negative changes in mood and thinking, and hyperarousal. Sorting the burnout dimensions from the trauma symptoms is what lets you tell the two conditions apart in a vignette.