Dr Divya Mehta - Geneticist
“Family and community support act as protective factors against stress.”
”It’s really important, but it’s really difficult to study!”. As we start the conversation, my interlocutor of the day intends to make it clear that one of the greatest roadblocks to understanding burnout is the lack of robust and objective diagnostics.
Dr Divya Mehta is a geneticist. She analyses large data sets to study how genes contribute towards our health. She explains to me that burnout is not a medical condition and it does not appear in the international reference of Mental Disorders used by psychiatrists, called DSM. As a consequence, there’s a lack of general consensus on the diagnostics and the term burnout regularly gets misused. This makes it hard to confirm that a data set comes from a person experiencing burnout.
In order to avoid that problem, Divya focused her recent study on a population that is highly likely to experience burnout: paramedical students. Her results are fascinating. In essence, she showed that developing a sense of belonging and having social support can alleviate the effect of stress on the epigenetic profile of genes. In other words, family and community support act as protective factors against stress.
Divya is very enthusiastic when she talks about epigenetics that she describes as ‘the extra layer of information that lies on top of the DNA and acts like a controller of genes’.
”Epigenetics helps us explain why DNA is not a destiny! People can have hope!”, She adds. ” Small things drive real change. Doing things for your health and well-being is a good direction!”. Considering her research, making time to develop social connections is another great direction to counter balance the effects of burnout.
Recommended read: “Stress is a health hazard but a supportive circle of friends can help undo the damaging effects on your dna” by Divya Mehta
Dr Divya Mehta is an Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology.
Our DNA is not our destiny.