When I got my diagnosis ”Exhaustionsyndrom”, I didnt release I had got a Swedish disease. But apparently, this diagnosis is only existing in Sweden as far as I know.
Does that mean that people abroad dont get sick out of stress? That I have hard to believe.
It was the Swedish professor Marie Åsberg at Karolinska Institutet who invented the diagnosis, ”Exhaustionsyndrom”, and namned it. The term was launced in 2003.
Today a lot of people are on sick leave because of this diagnosis.
Outside Sweden the phenomenon with exhaustion after a long time of stress has been labeled much later. This spring World Healh Organisation for the first time classified the condition as a medical condition.
But WHO calls it Burnout, and it is not exactly the same thing. The different is that the Swedish diagnosis include a persons entire lifesituation, and mean that you can get sick of stress not only in your workplace, but also because of your private life. Burnout refers specificially to exhaustion caused by work.
So if I havn´t lived in Sweden I might not been considered suffering from burnout, since I got sick due to longterm stress in my personal life.
Then doctors talk about burnout they also often say that the phenomenon can lead to death. Burnout causes weaker immunesystem, which can lead to cancer and heart-failure, and depression, which can cause suicide. In Sweden we tend more to look upon ”Exhaustionsyndrom” as a pfase, something you will recover from if resting properly.
I think, as a former patient, not as a scientist or a doctor, that it would help if ”Exhaustionsyndrom” was a diagnosis worldwide. Science would benefit from it and so would patients. Still there are no cure for this condition, rather than rest, and more and more people suffers from longterm stress so the need is vastly.
What do you think?
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