When the drive that built your life starts to cost you.

Burnout isn't a character defect, and it isn't a formal psychiatric diagnosis. It's a state of chronic depletion that builds when the demands on you outrun your capacity to recover, often for months or years before you let yourself notice. High-functioning people are especially good at hiding it, which is part of why it lands so hard.

The hard part is that burnout rarely travels alone. The same exhaustion, low motivation, poor sleep, and trouble concentrating can be ordinary stress that will lift with real rest and change, or they can be a sign of depression, an anxiety disorder, undertreated ADHD, or a sleep problem that has been quietly draining you. Those are different problems with different answers, and treating the wrong one wastes time you don't have.

Our role is to sort that out honestly. We aren't here to medicalize a demanding season of life or to suggest that ambition is a disease. We're here to look carefully, tell you the truth about what we find, and help you build the right response, whether that's a treatable condition we can manage, or a structural problem in your life that a prescription would only paper over.

Signs we look for

• Exhaustion that sleep and weekends no longer fix
• Growing cynicism, detachment, or dread about work you used to care about
• Trouble concentrating, slower thinking, or more mistakes than usual
• Irritability or a short fuse with the people closest to you
• Sleep that's broken, or a mind that won't power down at night
• A sense of going through the motions, or that nothing you do is enough
• Relying more on alcohol, caffeine, or other habits just to keep functioning

How we evaluate

A careful evaluation starts with your story, not a checklist. We take a thorough history of your work, your sleep, your mood, your focus, and how long this has been building. We use validated rating scales where they help, and we deliberately look for the conditions that hide behind the word burnout, including depression, anxiety, ADHD, and sleep disorders, as well as medical and lifestyle factors that mimic them. The goal is a clear answer to one question: is this chronic stress that calls for changes and support, or is there a diagnosable condition underneath that we can treat. We tell you what we find plainly, including when the honest answer is that medication isn't the tool you need.

How we treat

Treatment follows the diagnosis, not the label. If the evaluation points to a condition like depression or an anxiety disorder, we treat it directly, which may include medication started carefully and followed closely, explained with the real tradeoffs. If the picture is chronic stress without a diagnosable illness, medication is usually not the answer, and we'll say so. In both cases the most durable work often happens in therapy or with coaching, where you can address workload, boundaries, recovery, and the patterns driving the depletion. Sigma provides the psychiatric evaluation and medication side of your care and coordinates with a therapist or coach when that's the right fit. We can help you find that support and work alongside it. Many people in this position get meaningful relief once the right target is identified and addressed.