Burnout in helping professions is commonly framed as a demand-driven exhaustion syndrome. This study advances a meaning-centered and moral-structural account, proposing that burnout co-occurs with a crisis of meaning when institutional constraints undermine professional values and perceived agency. Using a cross-sectional online survey recruited via Reddit (N = 72), we assessed burnout (MBI-GS-aligned), meaning in life, work meaningfulness, crisis of meaning, perceived control/self-efficacy, value incongruence/institutional pressure, and moral distress. Descriptively, institutional pressure and value contradiction were high, work meaningfulness was comparatively low, and crisis of meaning was elevated. Correlational analyses showed a strong positive association between burnout and crisis of meaning (r = .78), and between burnout and value incongruence (r = .69), while perceived control correlated negatively with burnout (r = −.64). Crisis of meaning was higher in social work/pedagogy than in nursing/medicine, and burnout peaked in mid-career (5–10 years). The findings support conceptualizing burnout in helping professions as intertwined with meaning disruption under constraint, with implications that extend beyond individual coping toward organizational and ethical interventions.
Keywords: Burnout; crisis of meaning; moral distress; value incongruence; perceived control; self-efficacy; helping professions; social work; online survey; Reddit recruitment.
Citation: Pazer, S. (2026). Burnout as a Crisis of Meaning in Helping Professions: Value Incongruence, Moral Distress, and Perceived Control in an Online Survey. J Psychol Neurosci; 8(1):1-8.
DOI : https://doi.org/10.47485/2693-2490.1146