Mental Health in the Arts Sector: a Research from Hungary

As part of the research for our Tandem project Co-Warming, we have organised three focus groups with our colleagues. Altogether 15 people were involved in the focus group research, including artists, art teachers and cultural managers.

Types of wellbeing - www.designforwellbeing.ch

To describe the syndromes of a state of mental fragility and possible BurnOut we mentioned the following:

loss of motivation
no sense of creativity
emptiness and nihil = “nothing touches me” or “nothing is important”
I don’t have time to live a moment or live an experience
loneliness
lack of focus
no source of energy
lack of recognition, lack of feeling useful – “it does not matter what I am doing”
lack of perspective
lack of love and attention
“I cannot take any input” feeling
private life catastrophe – no time for human relations, family, friends and relationship
lack of connection to myself, feeling of losing myself
feeling of disgust (of work or life)
lack of feeling progression
the feeling that I cannot give more to people / to outside

As it resonates with the description of BurnOut in psychological professional contexts, we concluded that all of the participants were familiar with the phenomenon of BurnOut, and could contribute to defining what it meant for them.

In the next phase, we explored possible causes of the BurnOut. Although external factors (e.g. unstable, threatening political context) were mentioned, the focus remained on personal feelings and situations, such as:

the FOMO (fear of missing out) and the incapability of saying NO,
freelancer lifestyles and related causes (endless working hours, no lines between personal and professional lives, continuous multitasking)
burden of proof, when success is more important than happiness even without understanding what success is.
focus on expectations instead of personal goals.
lack of perspective and sustainability in the cultural and educational sector
no feedback, no feeling of recognition
the intangibility of the work in the performing arts sector – no physical trace of our work
too much work (10-12 hours daily to make a salary between the minimum and average)
pressure of multitasking
feeling of intellectual exploitation

We can therefore conclude that the general lifestyle of our working environment makes us highly exposed to BurnOut, that is intensified by the environmental factors, such as the political and economic situation of Hungary.

We are also wondering if one’s personality type can be more exposed to Burnout than another? Why is it so important to leave a physical trace of our work? If given professions or sectors are more exposed to BOS than others? If there is a difference between overload (working for myself, I am still motivated but I work too much, no rest, etc, the theory of harmonic passion) and BOS (working for others or trying to meet others expectations, the theory of obsessive passion). And finally, how much BOS of artists is a Hungarian thing?

However, as a positive factor, we identified that the arts sector supports open communication and awareness about BurnOut, compared to other sectors. This suggests a possible constructive way of overcoming the individual challenges we face, by creating common wellbeing within our direct working environment, that then can contribute to each individual’s improvement in their own wellbeing.

Let’s see…