Many people leave their jobs, including politicsuniversities and health care systems—to feel profoundly misguided. Not just tired, but psychologically depleted.
They describe feelings that are often invisible, replaceable, manipulated, blamed, or emotionally muted. They expose themselves to trauma and all the consequences that come with it.
A recent study asked early career academics report on their work experience and this rhetoric and micro-level emphasis on responsibility (Martinez-Goñi et al., 2026).
Most of the time, the language doesn’t look like a protest against the organization and more like the consequences of a toxic relationship.
And of course there are parallels. Institutions regularly work with emotional profiling narcissistic lovers: demanding loyalty with a lack of mutual sympathy.
Institutions are not clinically narcissistic, but they are often large systems that optimize for self-preservation, image management, and risk avoidance, full of indisputable hierarchies and continuities of power.
Without human correction mechanisms and improvements like good leadershipdiversity and personnel policies, institutions may resemble the relational dynamics associated with narcissism.
Human improvements
We need human “intervention” to prevent psychological damage and ensure the development of people and institutions. Institutions need leaders, policies and cultures
- sympathy,
- reasonable flexibility,
- responsibility for relationships,
- context sensitivity,
- repair and discussion
- and diversity
acts as a recovery buffer.
Without these, embedded top-down and embedded in institutional culture, institutions risk becoming toxically psychologically extractive.
Parallels with narcissistic relationships
In toxic extractive workplaces, there are several parallel processes that resemble narcissistic dynamics.
1. Idealization, then devaluation
Institutions often hire employees with great language skills:
- “mission”
- “excellent”
- “change the world”
Companies often see new employees as promising, capable, and “better.” Think, for example, of the big jumps in wages by leapfrogging companies. But they often make people uncomfortable, sick, disabled, pregnantdissatisfied or tired. And it’s often more complicated for minority groups—the immigrant-background politician struggling with mental health, the pregnant Ph.D. student, a frustrated female surgeon.
2. Conditional value
People are valued first productivitycompliance, reputation, output and optics. And while understandable from a performance perspective, it’s closely related when supportive policies aren’t in place. tiredness culture. As we practice therapyvalue and productivity can be separated and it doesn’t have to hurt the bottom line or become a hippie approach.
3. Gas lighting through bureaucracy
People are told, “We care about well-being,” while systems are systematically harming—words and actions that don’t match.
Creates a contradiction cognitive dissonance. And this is especially evident in politics, health care, universities, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) rhetoric.
4. Punishment for authenticity
Evangelists and neurodivergent people often destabilize institutional image management. Thus, institutional systems are rewarded when left unchecked maskingsilence, performative positivity, strategic complianceand lack of diversity.
5. Lack of real maintenance or conversation
Importantly, human relationships survive disruptions and thrive through:
- take responsibility
- expressed sincere regret
- correcting conversations and behavior
- flexible solution seeking and iteration
But too often, institutions offer procedural responses instead of relationship repair at best and silence or punishment at worst.
Healthy institutions need a human touch
Healthy institutions are not only efficient and effective. They are capable of repair, humility, conversation and recognition of complexity. Without these human enhancements, institutions risk becoming psychologically corrosive and toxic, demanding loyalty from people while lacking the capacity for mutual empathy and often actively causing harm.
