This condition is classified under "Problems associated with employment or unemployment" in the section on "Factors influencing health status or contact with health services." The section is devoted to reasons other than recognized diseases or health conditions for which people contact health services. In a statement made in May 2019, the WHO said "Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is not classified as a medical condition. "The ICDs browser and coding tool both attach the term "caregiver burnout" to category "QF27 Difficulty or need for assistance at home and no other household member able to render care." QF27 thus acknowledges that burnout can occur outside the work context. The ICD-11 also has the medical condition "6B4Y Other specified disorders specifically associated with stress", which is the equivalent of the ICD-10s F43.8. If, after treatment, a person with burnout continues to have persistent physical symptoms triggered by the condition, in Iceland they may be considered to have "somatic symptom disorder" (DSM-5) and "bodily distress disorder" (ICD-11).Further detail about the varied ways clinicians and others use ICD and DSM classification with burnout was published by Arno Van Dam in 2021.The US governments National Institutes of Health includes the condition as "psychological burnout" in its index of the National Library of Medicine, and provides a number of synonyms.
The rest cure was a commonly prescribed treatment (though there were many others). Beard yet further broadened the potential symptoms of neurasthenia over time, so that almost any symptom or behaviour could be deemed to be caused by it. Don R Lipsitt would later wonder if the term "burnout" was similarly too broadly defined to be useful.In 1961, Graham Greene published the novel A Burnt-Out Case, the story of an architect who became greatly fatigued by his work, and who took much time to recover.In 1969, HB Bradley used the term "burnout" in a criminology paper to describe the fatigued staff at a centre for treating young adult offenders. This has been cited as the first known academic work to use the term for this concept.In 1974, Herbert Freudenberger, an American psychologist, used the term in his academic paper "Staff Burn-Out." The paper was based on his qualitative observations of the volunteer staff (including himself) at a free clinic for drug addicts. He characterized burnout by a set of symptoms that includes exhaustion resulting from works excessive demands as well as physical symptoms such as headaches and sleeplessness, "quickness to anger", and closed thinking. He observed that the burned-out worker "looks, acts, and seems depressed." After the publication of Freudenbergers paper, interest in the concept grew. In 1976, Christina Maslach noted the term being used by California lawyers working with the poor, and began to study the concept.In 1981, Maslach and Susan E. Jackson published an instrument for assessing burnout, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI).