The results show that burnout may boost the risk of illness by a "magnitude similar to other risk factors, such as high body mass index, smoking and lack of physical exercise," said study lead author Samuel Melamed of Tel Aviv University in Israel.

A new study of 677 workers in Israel revealed those who suffered job burnout were 1.8 times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. In Type 2 diabetes a person's body becomes resistant to the sugar-regulating hormone called insulin. The results held even when factors like age, sex, exercise and obesity were taken into account.

Some studies have found stress can cause poor eating habits and the consumption of more alcohol, both of which can lead to health problems. Researchers in the new study suggest stress can disrupt the body's ability to process glucose, which leads to diabetes.

The scientists studied apparently healthy Israeli workers from 1998 to 2003. Nearly 77 percent of the workers were men, with an average age of 43 years. The subjects had a range of occupations, which the scientists divided into five categories: senior management, middle management or supervisory jobs -- like engineers, teachers and computer workers -- nonprofessional and self-employed persons.

A questionnaire showed about half of the 677 subjects experienced high burnout. Of the workers, 17 developed Type 2 diabetes during the study period, with 3.2 percent of burned-out workers becoming diabetic compared with 1.8 percent of the other workers.

To decide if diabetes was affected by blood pressure, the researchers examined a subset of the subjects -- 507 workers -- for which they had tested for blood pressure. The burned-out workers showed lower blood pressure levels, indicating that it was not hypertension -- high blood pressure -- causing diabetes.

An alternative explanation could be that stress triggers a spike in fatty acids in the blood and a drop in the "good" cholesterol, HDL -- both factors associated with diabetes.

The job burnout may be only part of the picture, Melamed said.

"It is possible that these people are prone to diabetes because they can't handle stress very well," he said. "Their coping resources may have been depleted not only due to job stress but also life stresses, such as stressful life events and daily hassles."

Stress in general can disrupt the body's ability to process glucose, especially in people whose genetics make them vulnerable, said Richard Surwit of the Duke University Medical Center.

Surwit, who was not involved in the study, said the results should be replicated in a much larger group of subjects to see if the same results prevail.

Job burnout can lead to a combination of three symptoms: emotional exhaustion; physical fatigue or exhaustion; and cognitive weariness (slow thinking).

This state differs from a temporary malaise that passes after a period of rest. Causes of burnout include chronic stresses, such as lack of rewards, job insecurity, regular physical abuse and sexual harassment, as well as daily hassles and sudden traumas.

The scientists suggest, in the November/December issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, that the results confirm the need for effective interventions to reduce stress before it becomes burnout.

We're not going anywhere," my driver, Nelson Okello, whispered one morning last June, the two of us sitting in a jeep just after dawn in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwestern Uganda. We'd stopped to observe what appeared to be a "rogue" elephant grazing in a patch of tall savannah grasses.
This elephant, however, soon proved to be not a rogue - a young bull elephant that has been banished after making an overly strong power play against the dominant male of his herd - but part of a cast of at least 30. The ground vibrations registered just before the emergence of the herd from the surrounding trees and brush. We sat watching the elephants cross the road before us, seeming, for all their heft, so light on their feet.

Then, from behind a thicket of acacia trees directly off our front left bumper, a huge female emerged. "The matriarch," Okello said softly. There was a small calf beneath her, freely foraging and knocking about within the secure cribbing of four massive legs.

After 15 minutes or so, Okello started inching the jeep forward, revving the engine, trying to make us sound as beastly as possible. The matriarch, however, was having none of it, holding her ground, the fierce white of her eyes as bright as that of her tusks. Although I pretty much knew the answer, I asked Okello if he was considering trying to drive around.

"No," he said, raising an index finger for emphasis. "She'll charge. We should stay right here."

I'd have considered it a wise policy even at a more peaceable juncture in the course of human-elephant relations. In recent years, however, those relations have become markedly more bellicose.

Just two days before I arrived, a woman was killed by an elephant in Kazinga, a nearby fishing village. Two months earlier, a man was fatally gored by a young male elephant at the northern edge of the park.

African elephants use their long tusks to forage through dense jungle brush. They've also been known to wield them, however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators, pinning down a victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive thrust.

Okello told me that a young tourist was killed in this fashion two years ago in Murchison Falls National Park, north of where we were.

These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings.

In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a new statistical category, known as human-elephant conflict, or HEC, was created by researchers in the mid-1990s to monitor the problem.

In the Indian state of Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. Elephants have killed 239 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, since 2001.

In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.
Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity - for want of a less anthropocentric term - of recent elephant aggression.

Since the early 1990s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behaviour, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in "a number of reserves" in the region.

In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants responsible for killing 63 rhinos, as well as attacking people in safari vehicles.
In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 per cent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 per cent in more stable elephant communities.

For a number of biologists and ethologists, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have attributed aggression to the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans.

But in "Elephant Breakdown," a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental sciences program at Oregon State University, and several colleagues argued that today's elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma.

Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they say, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild that what we are witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind.

And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, elephants are not going out quietly. They aren't leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are beginning to pay close attention.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism.
Young elephants are raised within an extended, multi-tiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over lifespans as long as 70 years.

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting week-long vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull's lower jaw, the way elephants do in greeting.

Their sense of cohesion is further enforced by their elaborate communication system.

In close proximity, they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail.

When communicating over long distances, they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that can be felt for several kilometres by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.

The fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, has effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats.

The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or "allomothers") has drastically fallen, as has the number of elder bulls, which play a significant role in keeping younger males in line.

As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by younger, inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life.
The evidence from various researchers, even on a strictly observational level, is compelling.

The elephants of decimated herds - especially orphans who've watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling - exhibit behaviour typically associated with trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behaviour, inattentive mothering and hyper-aggression.

Even the relatively few attempts park officials have made to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds, the wayward behaviour - including unusually premature hormonal changes among adolescent elephants - abated.

But according to Bradshaw, the various pieces of the elephant-trauma puzzle really come together at the level of neuroscience. Though most scientific knowledge of trauma is still understood through research on human subjects, neural studies of elephants are now under way.

(The first functional MRI scan of an elephant brain, taken this year, revealed, not surprisingly, a huge hippocampus, a seat of memory in the mammalian brain, as well as a prominent structure in the limbic system, which processes emotions.)

Allan Schore, a UCLA psychologist and neuroscientist who for the past 15 years has focused his research on early human brain development and the negative impact of trauma on it, recently wrote two articles with Bradshaw on the stress-related neurobiological underpinnings of current abnormal elephant behaviour.

"We know that these mechanisms cut across species," Schore told me. "In the first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional brain is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that the infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother.

"When these early experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in things like affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and empathy. But when these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and neglect, there is a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain, especially in the emotion-processing areas."

For Bradshaw, these continuities between human and elephant brains resonate far outside the field of neuroscience.

"Elephants are suffering and behaving in the same ways that we recognize in ourselves as a result of violence," she said. "How do we respond to the fact that we are causing other species like elephants to psychologically break down?

"In a way, it's not so much a cognitive or imaginative leap any more as it is a political one."

Shortly after my return from Uganda, I went to visit the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, an 1,100-hectare rehabilitation and retirement centre in the state's verdant, low-rolling southern hills. The sanctuary is a kind of asylum for some of the more emotionally and psychologically disturbed former zoo and circus elephants in the United States - cases so bad that the people who'd profited from the animals were eager to let them go.

Given that elephants in the wild are now exhibiting aberrant behaviours that were long observed in captive elephants, it perhaps follows that a positive working model for how to ameliorate the effects of elephant breakdown can be found in captivity.

Of the 19 current residents of the sanctuary, perhaps the hardest-luck story is that of Misty, a 40-year-old, five-tonne Asian elephant. Misty spent her first decade in captivity with a number of American circuses and finally ended up in the early 1980s at a wild-animal attraction known as Lion Country Safari in Irvine, Calif.

It was there, in 1983, that she managed to break free of her chains and began madly dashing about the park, looking to make an escape. When a park zoologist tried to corner her, Misty killed him with one swipe of her trunk.
Misty was banished to the Hawthorn Corp., a company in Illinois that trains and leases elephants and tigers to circuses, where she lashed out at a number of trainers.

When Hawthorn was convicted of numerous violations of the Animal Welfare Act in 2003, the company agreed to relinquish custody of Misty to the Elephant Sanctuary. She was loaded onto a trailer transport on the morning of Nov. 17, 2004, and even then managed one final shot at the last in her long line of captors.

"The details are kind of sketchy," Carol Buckley, a founder of the Elephant Sanctuary, told me one July afternoon as we pulled up in her all-terrain four-wheeler to a large, grassy enclosure where an extremely docile and contented-looking Misty waited to greet us.

"Hawthorn's owner was trying to get her to stretch out so he could remove her leg chains before loading her on the trailer. At one point, he prodded her with a bull hook, and she just knocked him down with a swipe of her trunk. But we've seen none of that since she's been here. She's as sweet as can be. You'd never know that this elephant killed anybody."

In the course of nearly two years at the Elephant Sanctuary, Misty has become a testament to the Elephant Sanctuary's signature "passive control" system, a therapy tailored in many ways along the lines of those used to treat human sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Passive control, as a sanctuary newsletter describes it, depends on "knowledge of how elephants process information and respond to stress" as well as specific knowledge of each elephant's past response to stress.

Under this system, there is no discipline, retaliation or withholding of food, water and treats - all common tactics of elephant trainers. Great pains are taken to afford the elephants both a sense of safety and freedom of choice, two mainstays of human trauma therapy, as well as continual social interaction.

Too much about elephants - their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience - reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they're currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern might ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses - the preservation of our own self-image - the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.

The New York Times Magazine

In another study, the team found that both white Britons and Afro-Caribbean people in England were two to three times as likely to suffer from psychoses if they had been separated from a parent during childhood. Since absent parents are more common in Afro-Caribbean families, the researchers suggest this could explain the higher rates of psychoses (Psychological Medicine, vol 36, p 1541, and DOI: 10.1017/S0033291706009330).

The findings reopen the debate about the relative roles of genes and environment in schizophrenia. "They point quite strongly to environmental factors," says Morgan.

From issue 2579 of New Scientist magazine, 23 November 2006, page 7