[AIDS, burnout and fear of knowing. Dialectic observations for the benefit of clinical psychology and liaison psychiatry].

A review of the literature regarding burn-out provide a sample of specific variables that describes the phenomenon. This could potentially leads to the emergence of a set of actions intending to facilitate the task of health workers (at least if personnel managers pay it attention). However, it does not preclude the risk of burn-out, neither does it explain its nature. This syndrome seems to be more prevalent in certain medical departments and it occurs to us--through careful listening to health workers and AIDS patients--that, to learn about something that affects health workers, we have to ask patients, supposing they were in the first line. We then realized that knowledge makes distress.