Nearly two years into a drudging, dragging pandemic, each crumb of news about the Omicron variant can feel like too much to process.
Burnout, the psychological term for an all-consuming exhaustion and detachment, floated around the popular lexicon in reference to work for years, but became even more of a buzzword as it seeped into all the corners of people’s lives during the pandemic.
“When you’re dealing with long and unending uncertainty and trauma, there’s only so much you can handle,” said Thea Gallagher, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at N.Y.U. Langone Health.
“When you’re dealing with long and unending uncertainty and trauma, there’s only so much you can handle,” said Thea Gallagher, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at N.Y.U. Langone Health.
In the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters, Dr. Gallagher said, acute stress often leads to exhaustion and hopelessness over time. Australia, for example, has experienced more and more climate-related natural disasters, but scientists identified a pervasive sense of “issue fatigue” about climate change in the population there from 2011 to 2016: The Australians surveyed became less likely to report that they had thought about climate change or talked about it with their friends.
That kind of all-consuming exhaustion during extreme stress is normal and expected, said Dr. Srijan Sen, director of the Frances and Kenneth Eisenberg and Family Depression Center at the University of Michigan. In the first two months of the coronavirus pandemic, he personally observed an unexpected, significant drop in depression among health care workers, which he attributed to them having a sense of community and purpose. But as the pandemic has dragged on, he said, they have become more anguished and fatigued, as they wrestle with “a level of vigilance and concern that maybe was sustainable for two weeks or two months, but not for two years,” he said.
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