Until her nervous breakdown, Miriam Meckel, a high profile professor, broadcaster, and PR agent, was widely considered a role model in her native Germany. Her bestselling book about the experience warns of the perils of a non-stop communication society, and has reignited the debate about Germany's much vaunted work ethic.

Sitting across from her, you’d hardly believe it: Miriam Meckel seems so alert, witty and charming. And yet it was only a year ago that the 42-year-old suffered a total mental and physical breakdown. Before that Meckel had been living in the fast lane, rushing around the world for 15 years. Then came the crash. In September 2008, after several weeks abroad, she returned to Berlin to host an event on the US presidential election. When she woke up the next morning, she couldn’t even stand up. “It felt as though I’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills and uppers at the same time,” she recalls.

She was aching, breaking out in cold sweats, just sitting there and sobbing. Although wholly incapacitated, however, she sat down at the computer to check her e-mails. When she discovered 50 unread messages in her mailbox, she broke down. Her partner, television presenter Anne Will, took her to see the doctor, who readily diagnosed her condition: burnout.

The bliss of being unavailable

For the theologian’s daughter who had known nothing but success up to that point, it was not easy to accept the fact that she could not continue leading the life she had known before: “I just couldn’t believe that I can’t just keep going that way forever.” At 31, with a PhD in communication science, Meckel became Germany’s youngest female professor and was called off to Düsseldorf to serve as spokeswoman for Wolfgang Clement’s (North Rhine-Westphalia) state government. She hosted a TV talk show, wrote academic papers, newspaper articles and books, and in 2005 was appointed to a professorship at the renowned Swiss university in St. Gallen.

Miriam Meckel’s biography is not just a study in professional advancement, however, but also goes to show how hard it can sometimes be to actually put out things one has long since taken in and comprehended: it wasn’t until three years ago that Meckel finally published Das Glück der Unerreichbarkeit (The Bliss of Being Unavailable), a non-fiction book about the perils of non-stop communication.

An overheated pot of frog soup

The author was loathe to use the term “burnout” “because it fits into a schema in which the successful, who are part of society, burn out, while the less successful, the dropouts, get depressed”. So she deconstructed the media take on “burnout”. She found out that the term is fairly new – it was coined in 1974 by the psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger – but the symptoms have been known for a long time. Even Thomas Buddenbrook clearly suffered a burnout himself. And not unlike Thomas Mann’s anti-hero, Miriam Meckel did not grasp until much later how often she had overestimated herself even in her moments of weakness, in which she would squeeze the very last drop out of herself to meet her own expectations and those of others. But she kept on going because illness is an “undesirable” condition in our society. At least that is how she was raised: “In my parent’s generation, you pulled yourself together because there were other bread-and-butter problems to cope with.”

The author’s book has definitely hit a nerve. While in industrialised nations the incidence of on-the-job accidents has been steadily declining for years, cases of mental illness have been steadily spreading. Because the atomisation and flexibilisation of modern life puts a growing burden of responsibility on the individual, who constantly has to make decisions and feels overwhelmed by it all, Meckel believes. Also, the working world and family life used to be kept clearly apart. Nowadays everybody’s got a laptop or Blackberry at home: “That makes for certain freedoms, but what is missing is clearly demarcated downtime for relaxation.”

Danger lurks everywhere in this world of “Variablists”: “We constantly have to adapt to new situations, whether it’s the Internet, globalisation or threats like the financial crisis. We’re the frogs forever persuading ourselves how warm and pleasant it is in our pond, without noticing that the pond has long since turned into an overheated pot of frog soup. We’re being soft-boiled by stress and burnout,” says Meckel. The current spate of books about illness in which authors relate their sufferings and crises as candidly as Miriam Meckel does in hers now form a “sort of counter-movement”, she says. Meckel no longer wants to squeeze things in anywhere: she wants “as much room as there is stuff to put in it, or no more stuff than there is room to put it in”. That’s why she wrote her book.