The " nurse syndrome" is often invoked in the field of private relationships, to refer to women (mainly) who tend to invest in intimate relationships with people in pain whom they find themselves taking care of, at the risk of permanently establishing an imbalance in the couple, or even toxic relationships. But the nurse syndrome is also expressed in the world of work. We take stock of this issue.
At the origins of the concept, the " Florence Nightingale effect"
The concept of " nurse syndrome" is a derivation of another concept from psychological research: the "Florence Nightingale effect". This effect refers to the real story of a nurse who was strongly committed to improving medical care and the living conditions of patients and whose involvement in the field was considered excessively emotional, to the point that she was suspected of being in love with several of her patients. The Florence Nightingale effect points to a confusion of passions : love of the profession mixes with love for the people with whom it is exercised, commitment to the professional relationship mixes with intimate feelings.
The risk of the " Florence Nightingale effect" at work was originally identified in the health and social professions, which are known to be " vocational ". It is approached from the angle of a double risk : that of the exhaustion of the individual who dedicates himself to his work to the point of self-sacrifice and that of the dysfunctions induced by a deprofessionalization as affect takes precedence over protocol.
From care to quer : compassion fatigue
" Care " is no longer the prerogative of certain professions, but is now part of the managerial grammar of all sectors. We are now increasingly called upon to take into account vulnerabilities in the management gestures and we are asked to mobilize benevolent resources to help others grow. If it is common sense (and it is going in the right direction), it is not without requiring new efforts from managers or inducing new forms of fatigue.
We are thus seeing the appearance in companies of a phenomenon previously observed in hospitals : compassion fatigue. The empathic relationship is indeed very greedy in energy and psychic flexibility... It is unlikely to demand it with equivalent intensity throughout the day, every day of the week, for months and months, without the individual exhausting himself to the point of " quer " (suffering, in German). Also, we cannot ask for management by the " care " of as many individuals as when we manage by authority or process. But few managers will testify to the fact that their overall workload has been reduced to free up the availability and recovery time necessary to transform their practices towards a more empathetic relationship.
The paradoxes of commitment
Not content with drawing a lot of energy, the empathetic relationship willingly competes with each other, if not in contradiction with other requirements... At the risk of the paradoxical injunction! It is therefore necessary to take care of each person in his or her singularities and to move the collective forward in equity, to be in relational flexibility but to be intractably rigorous in processes, to value soft-skills while making figures, to think in the long term while demonstrating a high level of immediate efficiency, to encourage serendipity and the right to make mistakes while fearing sanctions in the event of a breach...
Constantly placing the individual in value conflicts at the same time as it requires agility at all times, the paradoxical injunction is known to be a source of stress and loss of discernment. Faced with contradictory systems of obligations, some will show signs of disengagement (withdrawal, distancing from the collective, social laziness, etc.) while others will enter the spiral of overinvestment, tirelessly chasing the need to heal the sick organization of its inconsistencies and to repair the wounds caused to individuals by the dysfunctions of the organization. And now we fall back on the nurse syndrome, with managerial behaviors of self-effacement and silencing of one's own needs to direct all one's energy towards the more or less unattainable goal of saving others.
Getting rid of perception bias to approach over-engagement differently
As we can see, the nurse syndrome is not so much a matter of individual neurosis in the relationship to work as an organizational problem of reasonable adjustment between the expectations of individuals and the real capacities they have (because of their skills but also the means they are given) to achieve their objectives. Getting rid of the idea that the nurse syndrome is a psychological flaw in the individual also allows us to free ourselves from the temptation to associate stereotypes related to femininity (sensitivity, emotionality, attachment to care ) with mechanisms of empathetic over-commitment.
There is no other reason why women are more often subject to it than the fact that there are more of them in professions with a high intensity of human interaction (medical and para-medical, personal services, education, social work, etc.) and in local management functions. The over-commitment of individuals in these professions and functions is more an indication of the need to change the conditions in which they work than of the urgency of curing everyone's neuroses!
