@Hip, then you don't believe that people can "burn out" from their work alone? Entirely due to feeling overworked with no ongoing biomedical illness?
It's not so much that I don't believe this is possible; it's just that the general public and psychiatrists alike automatically assume a psychosocial cause to burnout, without any investigation into possible organic illness underpinning it. I question this widely-held psychosocial assumption, and would try to encourage more research into organic causes, especially viral infection.
Traditionally lots of mental disorders (eg, schizophrenia, bipolar) have been assumed to have a psychosocial origin, but biomedical research is now showing there are organic, physical abnormalities in the brain and body of patients with these disorders. I think in the future, we will find abnormal mental symptoms and mental disorders are primarily underpinned by organic, biological factors, much more than psychosocial factors.
Often with burnout stories that you hear of, or read about in the newspapers, people in high flying jobs were doing very well, and loved their jobs, and got a great buzz from the stress and excitement of their work. Then often within a very short time, suddenly, everything changes, and the stress they were previously thriving in just a few months earlier now becomes a horrendous burden they cannot cope with.
Outside of extreme PTSD-causing events, my feeling is that someone cannot go from functioning very well and getting high on the stress and excitement of the work, to suddenly not being able to deal with it at all. I think this occurs too fast to be psychosocially-caused. I suggest a much more likely explanation for such sudden burnout is that the person caught a neurological virus, and this screwed up their high performance and high functioning brain.
This study looked into the link between burnout syndrome and infection. It found that those with burnout tended to report flu-like illnesses and gastroenteritis prior to the onset of burnout. So this study provides evidence that infections may be the cause burnout.
I think more research needs to be done on this burnout–infection link.
What I think we need to do is keep that concept separate from CFS/ME.
I am not equating burnout to ME/CFS, although there is some interesting similarity of symptoms. But what I am saying is that burnout is likely caused by contracting a viral infection, and it may be that the same viruses that are associated with ME/CFS (like coxsackievirus B, echovirus and Epstein-Barr virus) will also be found associated with burnout.
I got very burned out from a job I had, but once I left the company, I recovered quickly.
Are you sure you had burnout, and not just disillusionment with your particular employer? I have had one or two jobs that were quite soul-destroying because of the miserable work, miserable environment and miserable people, and I was so happy to leave those jobs, and felt much better when I did, but that's not burnout.
A closely related phenomenon to burnout is nervous breakdown. You come across stories of people who for years were doing very well with their work: with their career going well, or running their own successful and expanding businesses. But then completely out of the blue, they are hit by a nervous breakdown, and can no longer cope with their career, or can no longer hold the reigns of their own business. They inexplicably become riddled with anxiety and/or panic attacks, and their minds are no longer the master of the situation, so suddenly they can no longer cope with the work that some months earlier they had no difficulties at all with.
I think this sudden, out of the blue nervous breakdown / burnout, that can occur almost overnight, is most likely the result of catching a neurological virus, which affects the brain and nervous system. The speed at which nervous breakdown / burnout hits I think is too fast to be explained by psychosocial factors.
If it were psychosocially caused, you might expect a slow gradual degradation in the ability to cope, perhaps appearing over decades. But with nervous breakdown / burnout, people can be fine one month, and then in a terrible state a couple of months later. To my thinking, only the contraction of a neurological virus could explain such a rapid change of brain functioning.