In April 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Mark Ellwood examined the boom in luxury burnout retreats — and drew a distinction within it. On one side, the spas and resorts offering rest dressed up as treatment. On the other, what the piece called the original burnout clinics: serious, medically grounded rehabilitation now treating burnout as the clinical condition it is. Istana was the facility Bloomberg chose to illustrate the serious side of that line, in a piece it memorably titled White-Collar Wipeout.
What Bloomberg reported
The article reported what we had been seeing from the inside. Burnout admissions at Istana, frequently arriving in tandem with depression, PTSD or addiction, had risen 600% since March 2020. Our founder Ian Ross-Smith told Bloomberg that across six years at a comparable facility in Australia before founding Istana, he had seen “zero stated admissions for burnout.” By 2023, it had become one of the most common reasons people came to us.
Three years on, nothing in the piece has dated. The pressure has not eased, and the gap between resting and recovering has only become clearer.
Read the article
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