Depression and Burnout

In this video, David Hager, PharmD, BCPS, the director of clinical pharmacy services at UW Health, Madison, WI, discusses the relationship between burnout and depression. This video was filmed at the 2018 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting in Anaheim, CA.

David Hager, PharmD, BCPS: The concept of burnout, while very popular currently within the profession, is one of the hottest topics, one of the most published topics of the last 20 years. It’s not in the DSM IV for some reasons, so not everyone agrees that burnout is actually a form of mental illness or has true clinical characteristics different from depression. What we want to talk a little bit about is the overlap between burnout, as well as depression. One of my concerns about the focus that we have right now on burnout is that we’re going to start to lump anybody who appears to have burnout in the same group of people who have mental illness and have depression. If we treat those 2 groups the same way, I think we’re going to put some of our pharmacists and our patients at risk.