Empowering Character and Maturity To Resolve Societal Burnout

The preceding Inquirer letter shows why many deeply committed to their work leave the child welfare field.

by SaraKay Smullens, MSW, LCSW, DCSW, CGP, CFLE, BCD

     Alarmed by the numbers of mentors, friends, and colleagues leaving social work “burned the hell out, actually fried,” more than ten years ago I began research into this complex, often misunderstood phenomenon. Most focus concentrates on professional burnout. However, in digging into hundreds of studies, I found additional arenas where burnout originates and festers, intensifying others: personal, relational, and physical, with the body as readout for stress and trauma. 

     But there was a further arena not yet identified - societal burnout. We are overburdened by a perfect storm of unresolved, threatening societal challenges and a fiercely divided electorate. We are overwhelmed by the moral distress of war as we watch those in positions of power and influence skillfully pit citizens against each other, intensifying fear and anxieties to gain and maintain power and control.

     Although in their groundbreaking 1970 book, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler did not use the term “societal burnout,” they warned of the impact of the breathtaking pace of our technological revolution, in which the illiterate of the future would no longer be those who can’t read or write, but those unable to keep up with the demands of rapid change, and subsequently yearn for the impossible, to turn back the clock (the italics mine, not the Tofflers’). Today’s unsettling dangers and discord were precisely foreshadowed, as was the importance of preparing for increased crime and intense divisions awaiting us.

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