[Nurses experiencing burn out in psychiatry: from research to the hospital setting]

A purely managerial approach to burn out amongst nursing staff within a hospital setting, for instance, through the use of psychometric scales to measure the phenomenon, may implicitly lead to a singular focus on the vulnerability of the personnel concerned. Far from being a purely natural phenomenon, burn out should not be perceived as such, but rather it should be viewed in terms of how it relates to the ambiguity between the various professional sub-cultures of the different partners involved in the domain of care provision. In fact, burn out is socially constructed. It is not interpreted in the same way across all contexts, and varies for example when nurses speak about their personal challenges and difficulties associated with administering and performing their professional duties, or when their union representatives speak on their behalf to claim rights or create better conditions in their working environment, or when psychological researchers use the term. It is important to note that these different contexts influence how the term is construed, and scientific standardisation of such a term irrespective of the context in which it is used can lead to great misunderstanding. Burn out should be considered as referring to anthropological representations, that are either shared or not, between different health care professionals when they meet at the crossroads where interactions and exchanges occur between their professional culture and the general culture of the society at large.