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When Irvin Schonfeld ’69 came to Brooklyn College with a love of math and science, he intended to major in engineering but soon discovered that psychology would be his future. A professor of psychology at City College of New York for 40 years, his experience and research in his field of study—including job stress, depression, and antisocial conduct in youth—have made him a noted expert. Here, Schonfeld reminisces about his involvement in the anti–Vietnam War movement, his career as a teacher and researcher, and his recently published book, Breaking Point: Job Stress, Occupational Depression, and the Myth of Burnout.

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I’m a Brooklyn native. When I was two years old, we moved to the Glenwood Projects in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. I grew up there. It was predominantly working-class.

Back then, it was surrounded by prairies, freshwater swamps, and farms, although you wouldn’t know it if you visited the area today. I spent a lot of time with my friend Joel Friedman [’69] hunting for frogs and snakes, bringing them home, and keeping them as pets. Because of my experience capturing animals, I got interested in science. Joel and I got microscopes, and we would go into the swamp, collect water, and look at what was swimming around in it. While in middle school I started to excel in mathematics. As high school approached, I wanted to play football. But my father refused to sign the necessary paperwork, so I ended up joining the Tilden High School track team instead.

Speaking of Brooklyn College, why did you decide to enroll?

I wanted to win a track scholarship to a Division I college. But I injured my back during my senior year of high school. I had good enough grades to get into Brooklyn College. Although I was disappointed that I didn’t get to go to a “glamorous” Division I school on an athletic scholarship, going to Brooklyn College turned out to be a blessing. I got a great education at Brooklyn College. My wife attended an Ivy League school. I think my education was as good as hers. And Brooklyn College was free. I even ran track; I was a pretty good 400-meter runner.

Can you share with us any lasting memories of Brooklyn College?

I was involved in the anti-war and civil rights movements. The upshot was that the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Internal Security subpoenaed my college records. I also wrote for the college underground newspaper, Nova Vanguard. I tried to interview Robert Kennedy when he came to Brooklyn College to give a talk. This was a few months before he was assassinated in June of 1968. I donated to the Brooklyn College Library archives a letter I received from him about setting up an interview.
There was a scholar named George Kennan, a professor at Princeton, who had been a key figure in the State Department. He played a pivotal role during the onset of the Cold War. He wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine about student protests. That was in 1967. I wrote a letter to the editor of the magazine in response, which the editor rejected. But with so many letters pouring in, Kennan decided to publish a book that included his thoughts and some of the best letters that students had written. My letter was chosen. In 1968, while I was still an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, the book was published. It is called Democracy and the Student Left. It was my first mainstream publication.

It was a great time to be in college. We wanted to change the world, but the world changed us in many ways.

Tell us about your career path.

I was a math teacher for six years. While I taught, I attended graduate school at night at the New School for Social Research, where I earned a master’s degree in psychology. And then I left teaching. I had saved up a little money, and I got into the CUNY Graduate Center where I studied developmental psychology.

A job opened up at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, which is the Department of Psychiatry for Columbia University. With David Shaffer, a luminary in child and adolescent psychiatry, I worked on research linking a neurological abnormality to mood and anxiety disorders. Then I won a post-doctoral fellowship in epidemiology at Columbia’s School of Public Health, where I got to know Bruce Dohrenwend, a leader in the field of psychiatric epidemiology. Soon I was starting a family and happy to get a job at City College.

How did you get into the field of workplace burnout and depression?

I received several grants from CUNY and from the Centers for Disease Control to conduct research on factors that increase the risk of depression in teachers. While I was in the midst of that research, I started to read about burnout—this was in the early 1990s. Although I mostly published on the impact of teachers’ working conditions on depression, I published one, largely unread, paper on burnout–depression overlap. This was around 1992. Twenty years later, I received an email from the editor of the Journal of Health Psychology asking me to review a paper on depression and burnout. The researcher (reviews are masked) obtained a large sample of French schoolteachers and gave them and a sample of depressed outpatients a depression symptom scale and a burnout scale to complete. The depressive symptom profiles of the teachers with very high burnout scores and the depressed patients were similar. Depression scores of both groups differed sharply from the depression scores of teachers with lower burnout scores.

I recommended that the journal publish the study and forgot about it. Three months later I received an email from a French doctoral student, Renzo Bianchi, asking me if I would be willing to collaborate with him. When I learned that he was the author of the paper I reviewed, we started to collaborate. This was back in 2013. We have been collaborating ever since. He coauthored our new book.

Prior to the 1970s, workplace burnout was not formally addressed. You went to your job, gritted your teeth, and retired with a gold watch at the end.

There is a doctor at Harvard, Lisa S. Rotenstein, who conducted a review of 180 studies of burnout in physicians. And what she found was that there were 140 different definitions of burnout. So there is no consensus diagnosis. Although psychological exhaustion is the core component of burnout, there are, according to Christina Maslach, a leading burnout researcher, two other components of burnout— depersonalization and reduced accomplishment. Depersonalization involves distancing yourself from other people with whom you interact on the job. An example would be teachers maintaining their distance from students and doctors maintaining their distance from patients. Reduced personal accomplishment occurs when you are on the job and feel like you haven’t accomplished very much.

Renzo and I have found that correlations between the core exhaustion of burnout and depression are higher than the correlations among exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced accomplishment components. We are convinced that burnout scales measure several but not all depressive symptoms. Several colleagues and I are presenting on a 160-sample meta-analysis on burnout–depression overlap at the Work, Stress, and Health Conference in Seattle in July.

And can burnout behaviors and feelings lead to or be symptoms of depression? 

Burnout behaviors and feelings are not unrelated to depressive symptoms because people who are very depressed tend to denigrate their accomplishments. And often, people who are depressed tend to be a little standoffish and don’t want to interact with other people. Please remember that we regard depression as a continuum like temperature, and that people can have varying levels of depressive symptoms without being clinically depressed. Those experiencing very high levels of those symptoms are likely to be clinically depressed. In our research, Renzo and I have examined the burnout–depression relationship whether we treat both entities as reflecting continua or both reflecting diagnoses. Because there is little evidence to show that burnout is different from depression, it is impossible to claim that one causes the other.

So, by calling something workplace burnout we may be missing the depression that underlies it? What does the evidence suggest about treatments?

The last chapter of the book looks at treatments for depression and delves into two principal kinds of psychotherapy that have been demonstrated to be effective in helping people with depression: interpersonal therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. There’s excellent evidence that they are effective. And they don’t take years. The book also addresses research on workplace interventions that can prevent work-related depressive symptoms from developing. We, however, note there is a need for more research on workplace interventions.

Are you retired, yet?

Yes. I am a professor emeritus. I retired after I got COVID-19 in March 2020. I had three grandkids at the time. I thought that I would probably have a fourth one day, and I did. I wanted to be alive to watch them grow up a little. Nevertheless, I have felt ambivalent about retiring. I love research and writing. I’m teaching myself R programming, the software that almost everyone in data science uses. I am going to use it in a statistics class I am going to teach at the CUNY Graduate Center in the fall.

So, no burnout for you?

No, I love what I do!