Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the limits of rehabilitation programs developed for individuals with burnout in Finland. Where such projects set self-management as a goal, life had other plans for rehabilitees. Here, I question what plans purport to render visible and what promises it fails to deliver.

Paper long abstract:

Rehabilitative programs for burnout became a steady part of the public health system in Finland in the early 2000s. Based on the identification of this stress disorder by health experts as a "new hazard" of the economic and political policies that altered the nature of Nordic welfare in the past decade, rehabilitative programs became spaces for individuals to "update" themselves. The story of burnout as an emergent disorder framed how rehabilitees were to adapt to economic imperatives of the present and to manage their work-life balance in timely ways. In the set timeframe within which they were to live in a center, rehabilitees were to become aware of their limits and to plan their work accordingly upon their return to the workforce.

Attending to such programs in my fieldwork, however I found that projects for self-management had limitations. The planned return to work often failed or took longer than expected. Plans, though necessary for providing an outline of a certain future can also open spaces of doubt. Here, I explore how plans ironically highlighted to rehabilitees life as divorced from the plan in ways that rendered the plan - a plan - a mere model for what could be. Such a disjuncture, I found, led some to fall into further despair.