ED’s Place in Employee Wellbeing
Did my use of ED in the title get your attention?
No, I am not writing about the ED commonly seen in a lot of TV ads today, namely erectile dysfunction.
While erectile dysfunction can be particularly destructive to the wellbeing of men, the ED I am writing about is a new stress-related diagnosis called Exhaustion Disorder. Well, it is not actually new. It was introduced into the Swedish version of the International Classification of Diseases in 2005 -17 years ago.
While April might be Stress Awareness Month, there is a lot of conversation today about employee burnout as opposed to stress. But I have seen no conversation about Exhaustion Disorder. In other articles, I have challenged the assertion that so many employees today are actually experiencing burnout. I challenged that all these employees were truly meeting the three criteria area established for burnout syndrome. I suggested that rather than experiencing burnout, many employees may instead be worn out. Well, now I think they might actually be experiencing ED.
A recent published article by Elin Lindsater and colleagues analyzed 88 previously published Studies of ED in an attempt to create the first comprehensive synthesis of the ED research to date. They organized the studies into 6 themes:
- Lived experience of ED
- Symptoms and the course of the disease
- Cognitive functioning
- Biological measures
- Symptom measurement scales
- Treatment
Lindsater et al. described ED as focusing “on physical and emotional fatigue in the wake of chronic stress related to work and/or private life.” Lindsater et al. report: “Since the introduction of ED, the diagnosis has become almost as prevalent as major depression in Swedish healthcare settings and currently accounts for more instances of long-term sick leave reimbursement than any other single diagnosis in the country.”
ED shares the presence of physical and mental fatigue with burnout, but burnout requires an additional two criteria for a diagnosis, while ED does not.
Lindsater and colleagues noted that “despite the alleged resemblance to internationally recognized concepts such as burnout and chronic fatigue, the diagnosis of ED has not been included in any ICD-10 version outside of Sweden.”
In discussing their findings, Lindsater and colleagues wrote that further research is needed “to investigate the validity and reliability of ED as a unique diagnostic construct that might encompass fatigue dominated states seemingly triggered by exposure to chronic stressors. This involves empirical investigation into whether other topographically similar constructs such as burnout, chronic fatigue and vital exhaustion, as well as other stress response syndromes (e.g., adjustment disorder) and subtypes of depression have common psychological and biological underpinnings.”
While the need for further ED research plays out, the wise employer today will focus on stress and exhaustion. There is already a lot of evidence which indicates that ignoring both is bad for employee mental health, which in turn is bad for the workplace and the employer.
Reference:
Lindsater, Elin. Svardman, Frank. Walters, John. 2022. Exhaustion Disorder: A Scoping Review of Research on a Recently Introduced Stress Related Diagnosis. Available electronically at: http://www.psyarxiv.com. Accessed March 21, 2022.
