Moral Injury or Burnout

Burnout can be described as a group of symptoms an individual exhibits, including exhaustion and cynicism, which can combine to decrease one’s productivity. More recently the term Moral Injury is being applied to health-care professionals, physicians in particular. There is a difference between “burnout” and “moral injury.” A 2018 article by Simon G. Talbot and Wendy Dean was titled: “Physicians aren’t ‘burning out.’ They’re suffering from moral injury.” Silver, a journalist, described moral injury as the result of “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” Put another way, moral injury occurs when a brain perceives that there has been a betrayal of what is “right” by another individual or by one’s self as in “I did this.”