"Preface: Our book has a prehistory that begins in 1991. In that year, Irvin was preparing two separate papers for national conferences, one on depression in teachers, and the other on burnout in teachers. He decided, based on his conference talks, to publish a short paper suggesting that there is more overlap between burnout and depression than many researchers suspected at that time. He published the paper in the database run by the Education Resources Information Center, better known by the acronym ERIC (Schonfeld, 1991). The ERIC paper did not get much play. Irvin estimated that if he were to include his wife and sister, he could safely say that three people in the world read the paper. He was soon diverted away from questions relating to burnout and depression. With one exception, other research questions called for his attention, and he did not follow up on the ERIC paper. The exception was that a University of Maryland professor whom he met at a conference colloquium asked him to write a chapter on burnout and depression for a book about stress. The Maryland professor was the book's editor. Although Irvin wrote the chapter, unfortunately, it never got published because the publisher went out of business"-- Provided by publisher.