School Burnout: Overcoming barriers to recognition, prevention, treatment, and policy adaptation

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Background

Although education provides opportunities to maximize earning potential, experiences of distress in educational settings are acutely damaging to psychological and physiological health. Accordingly, concern is growing regarding school burnout, a proposed affective syndrome manifested as chronic exhaustion from school-related work, cynicism toward the meaning of school, and feelings of inadequacy toward school-related abilities and accomplishments. Recent empirical findings suggest school burnout is associated with a myriad of negative outcomes affecting the well-being and likely future prosperity of the youth.

Despite evidence suggesting that school burnout is a critical factor negatively impacting youth and emerging adults, it is underappreciated with significant barriers preventing its theoretical enrichment as well as its identification, prevention, and treatment. These barriers limit appreciation of school burnout as a serious, long-term problem in both health and academic contexts. To this point, the following call for submissions seeks to tear down these barriers to advance the understanding of school burnout.

The major barriers concern clarity of school burnout as a unique and independent affective construct. This has created debate contesting its operational definition and resulting prevalence, its differentiation from related constructs and associated symptoms, its instrument proliferation, its transmission mechanism(s) and developmental progression, and its status as a diagnosable, mental health disorder. Establishing a set of symptoms, a common definition, and a reliable and valid assessment instrument for this construct is vital for continued advancement. Providing a unique theoretical underpinning and clear empirical support of school burnout’s differential symptomology, developmental trajectory, and transmission mechanisms from traditional indices of negative affect (e.g., anxiety and depression) would greatly enhance burnout’s justification as a unique mental health disorder and bolster advocacy for policy change regarding diagnosis and treatment.

The risk of stigmatization from identifying as suffering from school burnout as well as the yet known qualities of social transmission likely obscures efficient identification, prevention, and treatment. As with other affective disorders, evidence suggest that being labeled “burnt out” may carry stigma while also being promoted through mechanisms of social contagion or medicalization. This then results in a two-sided problem: burnout prevalence grows as self-labeling increases but help-seeking behaviors decrease which then prevents appropriate treatment. To date, greater effort is needed to understand transmission pathways and burnout stigma, particularly in differing geographic and cultural populations.

This project seeks contributions that 1) evaluate how and why school burnout, theoretically and empirically, is developmentally distinguishable as a risk factor of well-being (psychological and physiological) and performance indices (i.e. academic testing, graduation, future employment placement) from similar constructs affect over time, 2) refine and improve the measurement clarity of school burnout by evaluating instruments through modern test theory approaches 3) investigate how socialization transmission (i.e., peer and parental interactions), particularly the importance of the social media climate, contribute to burnout within the educational setting (or vice versa), 4) provide a theoretical foundation, supported with empirical data, of how mental health stigmatization may influence or bias the recognition, treatment, and prevention of school burnout and 5) provide a platform for advocacy and discussion of potential policy implementation or modification regarding burnout as a diagnoseable mental health disorder.

Utilization of multiple research methodologies (basic, applied, and clinical) and statistical approaches will be viewed favorably, including use of behavioral and physiological measurements, qualitative and quantitative approaches, longitudinal or time-ordered designs, correlational and experimental designs, variable and person-oriented statistical analyses, multilevel modeling, modern test theory approaches, and training protocols. Article types of interest will include original reports, brief reports, data reports, systematic reviews, policy and practice reviews, method reports, hypothesis and theory articles, perspective reports, conceptual analysis, and clinical trials.

Keywords: Burnout, Development, Education, Health, Policy, Measurement, School, Treatment

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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