Is It Burnout Or Something Deeper? The High-Functioning Trap | Dr. Judith Joseph

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:00)
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You talk about this idea of high-functioning depression. How is that different from just burnout?

**Dr. Judith Joseph** (0:52)
Well, burnout is a workplace phenomenon. High-functioning depression is different. This is the high-functioning brain in the workplace. You still have the stress, the pressures from the outside. You remove that brain from the workplace and they don't get better. This is someone who, when they sit still, they cannot relax. They're humans doing, not human beings, right? What we found was that there was a high correlation between unprocessed trauma and pain and HFD, high-functioning depression. So, the theory is that they're in the workplace, they have the symptoms, they're out of the workplace, they still have the symptoms. That unresolved trauma and pain is being carried with them. It's not being processed.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (1:28)
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Welcome, Judith, to the podcast. It's good to have you here.

**Dr. Judith Joseph** (3:59)
It's so great to see you again.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (4:01)
Your work is quite fascinating because you've had kind of a flip on the typical thinking in psychiatry. Now, just as in the world of health, in medicine, we think of, you're okay if you don't have a disease. Like the absence of disease is health, but that's not true.
And I think health is something else. It's a sense of positive vitality, well-being. And in psychiatry, it's the same thing. If you don't have these clinical depression by these scales or anxiety or whatever it is, then you're fine. But there's another level of like full expression, happiness, joy, feeling that so many of us don't have. And we walk around living our lives in this, and I'm speaking for myself here, just overdoing, overachieving, driving, and you're high functioning. Like I was very high functioning. I wrote 20 books in 20 years. I'm like, have a practice. I've done all these things. I started a Center for Functional Medicine, Cleveland Clinic. I was just so driven.