Burnout is thought to result from unresolvable work stress and leads to people experiencing emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, where they start to see others as impersonal objects.
Emotional exhaustion constitutes the central characteristic of burnout as well as the entry point into the syndrome; refers to a coping strategy regarding depersonalisation.
Depersonalisation has been conceived of as an immediate reaction to emotional exhaustion; emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation have been claimed to ‘go together’ and ‘mutually reinforce one another’.
From an etiological standpoint, burnout is thought to result from unresolvable work stress. Burnout has become a popular construct among occupational health specialists over the last few decades. However, burnout is not an established diagnostic category, and its overlap with depression is problematic, both at an etiological and a symptom level.
The spectrum of paranoid ideation goes from mild distrust and suspiciousness to full-blown persecutory delusions, and research suggests that paranoid thinking may be a regular experience in one in three individuals in the general population.
However, a growing body of evidence indicates that paranoid ideation is associated with social stress and work stress. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between burnout and paranoid ideation, based on reliable measures of the variables.