Burnout sceptics

The press picked up on burnout and filled pages of newspapers and magazines with new categories of burned-out workers, from lists of symptoms to quizzes. Everyone suffered.

The sceptics fired back. "The new IN thing is 'burnout,'" a Time columnist wrote. "If you don't come down with it, you're a bum." Even Freudenberger was tired of burnout. Still, in 1985, he published a new book on Women's Burnout. The press loved quoting him, writing that "you can't have it all."