To coincide with the release of her new book, Exhaustion: A History (Columbia University Press, 2016), Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities, has just been interviewed by the US magazine, Psychology Today.
Psychology Today is published every two months, with the aim of making psychology literature more accessible to the general public. It has a print circulation of around 275,000 copies and an active online version.
Anna is featured in the column ‘The Book Brigade’, a Q&A series with authors of new and recent works. Discussing the concept of exhaustion, Anna argues ‘ours is an exhausting age, and there is much to justify debates about burnout, work-life balance, and how other cultural factors affect our energy resources.’
When asked the most surprising thing she learned about exhaustion from writing her book, Anna claims, ‘I was inclined to believe what many others were arguing, namely that ours is the most exhausted age. What surprised me most was the substantial body of evidence I discovered that showed that ours is far from being the only age to have been preoccupied with exhaustion; many before us have felt exactly the same way.’
To read the full interview, please see the Psychology Today site here:
www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-author-speaks/201606/exhaustion-history