ABSTRACT
"Burn-out" is a kind of assistential laboral stress which affects the professions which involve an interpersonal relationship with beneficiaries of the job, such us health workers. It originates emotional alterations which lead to feelings of emptiness and personal failure or laboral inability. The revisions about studies of mental disorders in health workers fall upon such laboral stress and remark that in such professional people there is a bigger prevalence of disorders because of the use of substances and of depression. To analyse the mental disorders in health workers by means of the retrospective study of a sample in a general hospital which asked for a psychiatric consultation, sociodemographic variables, clinico-diagnostic and variables related to laboral activity were analysed. The sample is constituted by 112 patients of an average age of forty years old and preferentially females (79.5%). In the sample, some professions are represented above all expectations; they are nurses, physicians, the laboral category of "boss and managers" and the laboral regimen of "permanents". The more frequent psychiatric disorders were the adjustment disorders and code V, the affective disorders and the anxiety disorders (23-33%), the disorders caused by the use of substances and the psychotic disorders are limited (5%). The laboral activity was considered an important factor in 43% of the cases and the mental disorder caused laboral inability, transitory or permanent in half of the patients. It is detected a relationship between the diagnostic and variables such as sex, laboral category, laboral inability, psychosocial stress level and GAF and there hasn't been detected any association between mental disorders and age, profession, laboral regimen and laboral stress.
