You're not alone: yes, SCI burnout is real and serious

If you’re a wheelchair-using super quad or para and think your life is not any more stressful now than it was before your injury, you may want to skip reading this. Chances are though that the vast majority of individuals with a spinal cord injury are not part of that group. Living with a spinal cord injury isn’t necessarily a “job,” but to anybody living with paralysis, it can certainly feel like a job.  Recently, the World Health Organization added burnout to its International Classification of Diseases. In that case, we’d like to introduce you to a term not used too often: SCI burnout.

In his column for BACKBONES, Mike Franz, a C6 Quadriplegic, 16 years post-injury from Michigan, writes that the symptoms of burnout include feelings of energy depletion and increased feelings of negativism and cynicism toward one’s job. Individual experiences will vary, but in a typical week, he reports spending spend approximately 30 hours dealing with situations that he would not deal with if not for having a spinal cord injury. Coincidentally, 30 hours also happens to be the generally accepted threshold for a job to qualify as full-time.

You can read the rest of his column HERE.