Healing the Healers through Collaborative Poetry: a qualitative analysis of the emotions of burnout

Abstract Clinician burnout is a pervasive emotional syndrome that is fueled by shame, fear, and excessive work-load. Burnout is a widespread term that is often an over-generalized term for complex emotions. This study adds complexity to the definition by allowing clinicians to describe burnout in their own words through collaborative poetry. From February 2021 to April 2025, 165 participants, across 16 sessions engaged in collaborative poetry writing exercises that began with a brief presentation on clinician burnout, followed by guided writing and group poem creation. Participants, whether virtual or in-person, wrote individually before selecting and rearranging lines to form a collective poem which they read aloud together. The sessions concluded with reflections on burnout, vulnerability, and resilience. The resulting poems, chosen themes, and original independent poems were analyzed using grounded theory to identify shared themes using MAXQDA software. Five themes were identified that described burnout signs, in order of frequency: pressure, challenging, loss of agency, overwhelmed, isolation. Six themes were identified that described emotions that could defend against burnout, in order of frequency: gratitude, connectedness, resilience, learning, and pride. The most common theme across these two categories was “pondering”, a combination of themes for questioning and reflection which at times expressed burnout and, in other instances, a burnout defense. Findings suggest that burnout is a complex emotion; possible mitigation of burnout should address feelings of connection, gratitude and pride in one’s work. Further research is needed to define how health systems could use collaborative arts to lessen burnout emotions and increase emotions that defend against burnout.