Abstract

The topic of my master's thesis is the media discourse on burnout. With the help of a discourse analysis, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild Zeitung are used to analyse how burnout is negotiated in the two newspapers. Under the title Burnout als gesellschaftliche Selbstthematisierung. A discourse-analytical examination, I pose the question of the burnout subject. How is it thematised and how does it thematise itself at the same time? Which definitions are made here and how do the individuals perceive themselves? The analysis of the material so far has shown that different but recurring characteristics can be identified that outline a kind of profile of the burnout subject. With the help of certain linguistic and metaphorical means, burnout is symbolically charged and takes on social significance. Another mental illness much discussed in the media is depression. The aim of the analysis is to find out how and with what burnout and depression are connoted in Germany and to what extent a distinction is made between the two clinical pictures.

A second focus and associated question is aimed at the instructions for self-management proposed in the discourse: Which instructions for self-leadership can be uncovered and described in the discourse? And which models and strategies are designed to deal with the "problem" of burnout? The review of the material so far suggests that burnout can be read as a consequence of structural change. Closely interwoven with this change are key words or phrases such as increasing pressure on individuals, stress or alienation . However, the moment individuals come out as suffering from burnout in the media discourse, the problem of society as a whole is broken down to the individual and individualised. It is not the structures that cause illness that are problematised, but the individual that is pathologised. The instructions for burnout subjects do not only focus on the changing world of work, but also on the individuals themselves and make it their duty to become active in the sense of an entrepreneurial self (cf. Bröckling).

Finally, the third step is to analyse which scientific references are recruited and which power effects they entail.

In my analysis of the media discourse on burnout, I start from a basic constructivist assumption, namely that social reality is constructed performatively through language and images in discursive practices and discourses. The theoretical approach of the analysis is based on Michel Foucault; I mainly refer to his works "The Order of Discourse" and "Archaeology of Knowledge". Here you will find fundamental considerations on his theory and empiricism of discourse, as well as on the questions of scientific references and their power effects. According to Foucault, the term discourse refers to "a set of scattered statements appearing in different places, which have been formed according to the same pattern or system of rules, which can therefore be attributed to one and the same discourse and constitute their objects".

Methodologically, with the help of Reiner Keller's sociological discourse analysis of knowledge, the Süddeutsche and Bild newspapers are examined with regard to burnout as a form of social self-thematisation. Ralf Rangnick's confession of burnout in September 2011 serves here as a discursive event around which the analysis revolves in terms of time. Ultimately, it should not be assumed that burnout has a fixed meaning, but that it can have a variety of meanings. However, these do not lie solely in the clinical picture of burnout, but are determined above all by the socio-cultural (knowledge) contexts and experiences of those who form an image of burnout, and do so again and again.