Combating Physician Burnout: A Guide for Psychiatrists

A high level of exhaustion, an increased feeling of depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment—the hallmarks of burnout—are on the rise in medicine. Combating Physician Burnout, the first book of its kind to focus on the field of psychiatry, aims to educate psychiatrists about the three key concepts of stress, burnout, and physician impairment.

Edited by experts on burnout, this volume features contributions from domestic and international authorities in the field. Five sections lay out the scope of the challenge and outline potential interventions. The introduction, which discusses the history and social context of burnout, provides psychiatrists who may be struggling with burnout with much-needed perspective. Subsequent sections discuss the potential effects of burnout on clinical care, contextual elements that may contribute to burnout, potential systemic and individual interventions, and the moral challenge burnout poses to psychiatry.

Psychiatric residents, established psychiatrists, and their employers will find in this guide a unique psychiatric perspective on burnout, as well as practical advice for combating its effects on providers—and on their patients.