سوختن در حرفه تدریس

Teachers have been claimed to have more mental health problems than other professions. However this has not been formally established. Reviewing a worldwide literature no study except one where the comparison group was inadequate, show an increase either in psychological distress or psychiatric morbidity. A recent French study (1999/2000) conducted at MGEN in a national French representative sample (6650 persons, 3856 teachers) confirms this result except for the ageist women teachers who were suffering more from depression than the non teacher equivalent age strata. On the other hand teachers considered themselves as stressed but this is hard to compare to others profession and no one study was describing adequate control group if any; at any rate feeling of stress does not constitute a disease. Turning out to burnout the authors tackle the issue by presenting the burn out as initially described by Maslach on nurses and look at the possibilities to apply it to teachers. They underline the dimensions of burnout as three dimensional: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and low personal accomplishment. Although close to anxious and depressive symptoms the burn out person will attribute them exclusively at the working situation; in addition the burnout has been described in the helping professions in which reaching an ideal was considered as an important motivation which was not reached; consequently the person becomes distant to the patients and treats them as object loosing interest in his job. This could be explained trough psychoanalytical and sociological perspectives as well and the authors considered that this concept could be applied to the teaching profession. They quoted a study using the Maslach inventory adapted to teachers by replacing “patients” by “students”. To test some of the hypotheses, the data from the MGEN survey concerning the motivations to choice the profession: ideal versus material motivations, the feeling to have completed this ideal and some reported difficulties to perform diverse teachers tasks were analysed. More women that men declared having chosen the profession to complete an ideal (44.3 versus 35,5%) and this motivation helps the teacher to feel in agreement with his ideal when teaching; however it increases the sense of moral responsibility toward their scholars and decreases the fear to teach and be impotent toward the scholars. Psychological distress scores are lower in those who chose to teach by ideal at the beginning of the career then this effect disappears. To feel in accordance with this ideal is linked to low distress score. Finally on the group who reports between 6 and 10 years of experience, those who have chosen by ideal and feel not be able to reach their ideal have the highest distress score and those able to reach their ideal the lowest distress score indicating an interaction between motivation and ideal completion toward distress. An empirically built theory is then described which shows a pathway to burnout for teachers: they want to provide to scholars knowledge and moral values and put efforts to obtain results; when they is no results after continuous efforts and adaptation the teacher enters a negative circle where he becomes less and less efficient which in turn accentuates the absence of results to end up with the constitution of a burnout syndrome. They conclude that teachers and the caring professions have very much in common: some of them came in by ideal and found the day to day work quite hard with few results and became more distant and cynical toward their patients or scholars; since teachers do not seem to present higher mental health problems than others professions their distance may be effective as a defence mechanism. Concerning mental health and relationships between vocation type choice for this profession, they felt distance to professional ideal and mental health in relation to career duration. They conclude that burnout may be considered as a relatively efficient defence mechanism again stress which may prevent mental health disorders.