Addiction Treatment Blog

With rising competition between businesses, employees from all kinds of industries are feeling the stress of everyday life. Having to complete more work and less time has led to many employees developing executive burnout. Executive burnout can result in long term health problems, as it can affect eating habits, emotional stability and physical wellbeing.

As executive burnout can have undesirable consequences on a person’s life, it has to be treated as soon as it starts to get out hand. Therapy and medication are the most common ways of treating executive burnout, although there are other ways of reducing it.

• The most ideal way of reducing executive burnout is by changing the work situation. Learning to make a change from a frantic work routine to a comfortable and less stressful one is the first step towards treating the disorder

• One of the most important ways of reducing executive burnout is by avoiding making unattainable promises or stressing over deadlines.

• Another way to deal with executive burnout is by ensuring that there are adequate resources to complete a job. Having enough people to complete a job will reduce stress greatly.

As an employee, it is also advisable that you don’t take on work that you know you can’t complete, and turning down projects once in a while can help to treat executive burnout.

The responsibility of managing business activities and the employees of an organisation can be very challenging and stressful for anyone. Many people in this position try to hide their own feelings of being burnt out, but those feelings can get out of hand.

Executive burnout is defined as exhaustion of physical or emotional strength of an executive and his/her motivation, caused by prolonged frustration or stress.

Executive burnout can be detected when you notice that a person is:

• Losing interest in their job
• Unable to concentrate and deliver results
• Feeling anxious about coming to work
• Feeling powerless to effect changes
• Getting irritated very often
• Becoming more and more isolated

Executive burnout cannot always be hidden from colleagues and the way they react can add to the intensity of the condition.

Workplace stress can trigger depression; lead you to drug and alcohol abuse. You might develop high blood pressure which may cause stroke or heart attack any moment.

Treatment may be needed to identify the issues causing the burnout and to what extent. You should approach a specialist rehabilitation centre for treatment and therapy options. These centres provide high quality counselling along with medication to treat executive burnout. The sooner you act with treatment the more likely you are to avoid spiralling into more difficult forms of depression.

As companies constantly search for higher quality and service levels and complete business flexibility, employees at all levels are finding themselves under extreme pressure from excessive work. Performance targets have become more difficult to meet and for this reason, managers and employees alike have started taking work home so they can meet important targets. However, this type of overworking is resulting in a new kind of illness known as executive burnout.

What is executive burnout?

The overwhelming feeling of keeping up with intense work schedules that leads people to feel excessively stressed and exhausted can be termed as executive burnout. In addition to demanding jobs, meeting family requirements, keeping up with friends and completing daily chores can add to executive burnout. This can make sufferers retreat from people and other non-work related responsibilities. It is important for executive burnout to be treated quickly, but prior to this, it is vital that the illness is properly recognised.

Signs of executive burnout

Emotional tiredness – Executive burnout can make people feel frustrated, angry, depressed and dissatisfied. Negative emotions tend to become predominant and it becomes tiring to maintain oneself through the day.

Interpersonal issues – It also becomes tough to deal with others when emotionally drained with work. A person suffering from executive burnout usually overreacts with increasingly hostile or emotional outbursts when conflicts arise. This causes them to drift away from other people.

Health troubles – When emotional reserves get exhausted, the person might experience physical problems like back pain, headaches, insomnia, chest pains, gastrointestinal problems and colds. They tend to feel tired and run down constantly and are also more prone to accidents.

Aside from these symptoms, executive burnout can also result in addictive resolutions which can affect the person badly. For this reason, it is important to treat executive burnout immediately.

In addition to the types of anxiety mentioned earlier, there are a number of different situations in which anxiety arises according to which it is categorised and treatment given. There are many different occasions of anxiety and in this article, you will find a detailed explanation to each of them in different subjects; such as Stage Fright Anxiety, Panic Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), etc. Read more…

Lithium Pellets

There are some suggestions from as early as the 2nd century AD that spring waters that were alkaline (which would be expected with a high concentration of lithium salts) were known to be of some use in the treatment of overactive states such as mania (1).

Lithium itself was isolated first by August Arfwedson in 1817. It was named lithium as it was found in stone – lithos being the Greek for stone. During the 1850s alkaline compounds, like lithium, were known to be of some use in preventing gout by interfering with the precipitation of uric acid in the blood and joints. At the time mania and melancholia were often seen as being part of the same family of diseases as gout and this led to the use of lithium for these conditions also. As early as 1880, the use of lithium in this manner led Carl Lange to suggest that it might have a role in preventing episodes of periodic depression.

Surprisingly, however, despite these discoveries and what would now appear to be correct hunches, lithium slipped out of use for mood disorders and had to be rediscovered in 1949. In part this was because of its side effects. In the middle of the 19th century, several investigators took lithium and noted that it caused increased urine flow, tremor of the hands and difficulties with memory or concentration, which led to wariness regarding its use. Later in the 1930s, it was used as part of a salt restriction diet in the United States and in many cases it caused such clear cut toxicity that its use was banned by the Foods and Drugs Administration (FDA). Read more…

Mania is for practical purposes the mirror image of depression. Approximately 50% of people affected present with an elated, euphoric mood. They may be grandiose in their attitudes and beliefs uninhibited in their behaviour. However, the remainder may be irritable and tetchy rather than elated and euphoric and paranoid rather than grandiose. Common to both groups is an increased level of activity, so that hyperactivity is perhaps the most consistent diagnostic feature of mania. In addition, there is typically an increase in appetite and a decrease in time spent asleep.

In 1853, Falret and Baillarger independently described a bipolar disorder, in which affected individuals cycled between periods of elation, or mania, and depression. This was variously called folie circulaire or folie à deux periodes. It forms the basis for what is now recognised as manic-depressive disorder. In 1896, Emil Kraepelin divided the major psychiatric illnesses into manic-depressive illness and schizophrenia. The former was primarily a disorder of mood, the latter a disturbance of cognitive functions. The former usually followed an episodic course with individuals recovering to normal between episodes. The latter was more likely to become a chronic illness with a majority of affected individuals not every fully recovering. These distinctions have broadly speaking held to this day. Read more…

As with almost any other pills, antidepressants has their own side effects.

For the first 2 weeks of taking an antidepressant, there may be little other than side effects. Generally, these will be mild. In some cases, however, they may be irritating or even intolerable. The first point to be made is that an antidepressant should only cause tolerable side effects. If treatment makes someone clearly worse, it should be stopped until advice has been sought and until that advice addresses the problem in hand.

Where side effects are more tolerable, there can be a great problem in distinguishing the effects of treatment from some of the symptoms of the illness. Both drugs and illness may cause a dry mouth, headache, indigestion, increased anxiety, sleeplessness or sedation for example.

There is a further unusual aspect to antidepressant side effects. When individuals are depressed, they are often much less sensitive to the effects of anything. They can’t smell, taste or hear as acutely before, for example. It is also common to find that sleeping pills don’t help the insomnia that goes with depression – even three to four times the recommended dose may not bring about sleep. After recovery, some people may be knocked by a low dose of the same sleeping pill that appeared inactive several weeks previously.

However, while some people are less sensitive to side effects when they are depressed, others seem more sensitive. It is very difficult, therefore, to predict the side effects that an antidepressant will have.

The side effects listed are typical. Some occur in everyone to some extent, depending on the particular compound, but they are usually mild and wear off after a few days. Even if they are severe, it should be noted that these side effects are reversible and will halt almost immediately on stopping the drugs.

As with the neuroleptics, there are two sorts of side effects to note. There are those which may feel like a worsening of the illness, like feeling more nervous, feeling strange or unreal, or even hearing voices. These latter side effects are the ones that need careful judgement. Read more…

There are seven major physical treatments for depression at present.

• Tricyclic Antidepressants (Table 1). These have until recently been by far the most widely used.
• The Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) (Table 2).
• Reversible Inhibitors of Monoamine Oxidase (RIMAs) (Table 3).
• 5-HT Reuptake Inhibitors (Table 4).
• Other Antidepressants (Table 5).
• Treatments for Bipolar Disorders or Prophylaxis of Recurrent Disorders (Table 6).
• Others (Table 7)

In the last category, a number of other treatments are marketed for or used for depression and they often work, but whether they are antidepressants in the same sense as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), imipramine or phenelzine is a matter of dispute. The 5-HT-1a agonist, buspirone, has in addition been marketed as an antidepressant, and a further compound from this group, flesinoxan, looks as though it may also emerge as an antidepressant.

Finally, there is also ECT, the mechanism of action of which, and its use clinically will not be discussed at any length in this article. Its role when antidepressants fail to work and in cases of mania will be considered at a later stage. Read more…

Learning from Burnout: Developing Sustainable Leaders and Avoiding Career Derailment

We were inspired to write our book, ‘Learning from burnout: developing sustainable leaders and avoiding career derailment’ for reasons of personal biography as well as professional practice. The former concern one of us burning out in their early thirties while working as a human resources executive for an IT company; the latter relates to our consultancy work with organisations helping them manage and develop their leadership talent. We noticed an increasing trend among this population towards action addicted, adrenalized working lives and what appeared to be – based on the number who were burning out – unsustainable approaches to the pursuit of career. At the same time we recognised that organisations were becoming increasingly more demanding and absorptive, and as a consequence, work and workplaces increasingly more all consuming. Like the high speed internet connections that serve our offices and our homes, work seemed to be always on. It had become a seven day a week preoccupation which was always there, brought into every facet of human life through the wonders of the Blackberry and the mobile phone. Work, it seemed, never slept, and those enslaved to it were sleeping a great deal less than they used to.

Burnout was the inevitable consequence of this heady combination of addictive behaviour and organisational greediness, or so it seemed to us. But when we referred to the literature on burnout we discovered that the leading authorities in the field believed burnout was largely caused by organisations, rather than both the organisation and those who work for them. We thought this rather odd. It did not resonate with our own experience of burnout, or with what we were seeing among the high achievers with whom we were working.

In addition, the self help industry’s claims that burnout can occur to anyone has devalued its meaning as a serious psychological condition. Apparently you are equally vulnerable to burnout whether you’re an over-stressed baby boomer, in a bad marriage, having a mid life crisis or a female indoor sex worker. As a result, the term has – to all intents and purposes – become meaningless. Read more…