In Japan, burn out is a real public health problem. The cases of death resulting from this syndrome of professional exhaustion multiply among Japanese employees, to such an extent that there is a term to designate this phenomenon: “karoshi”, understand: the risk of death linked to overwork. The fatal work overdose recently killed a 31-year-old political journalist. Miwa Sado, who covered the news in Tokyo for the Japanese public television channel NHK, died in 2013 of cardiac arrest after having … 159 hours of overtime per month. The victim had only had two days of rest the month before his death. The case, embarrassing for the reputation of the television channel, has only just been revealed, four years after the facts.
In Japan if the weekly working time is fixed at 40 hours, few Japanese respect this average, it being rather situated at the lowest word around 49 hours. In 2016 a white paper, initiated by the government of Shinzo Abe, was published to inform about karoshi. It drew up a worrying first inventory: nearly 200 employees died from overwork at work in 2016 as a result of a heart attack, stroke or suicide. .
Burnout, also a French malaise
“Karoshi” has been officially considered an occupational disease since 1988. In France, although deaths resulting from burnout are rarer than in Japan, burnout does not figure among the ranks of occupational diseases. In February 2017, a parliamentary mission requested this recognition of burnout syndrome as an occupational pathology. A proposal for the moment remained a dead letter.
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