Threshold Collapse Under Empirical Pressure

This preprint presents a theorem-guided qualitative secondary analysis of burnout, intervention, and restoration under conditions of prolonged unresolved load. The study operationalises the collapse family developed in Finite Capacity, Unresolved Load, and Threshold Collapse and examines whether that structure remains empirically legible and analytically discriminating when exposed to adversarial secondary material. The corpus consists of five full-text empirical studies representing intervention research, longitudinal analysis, diary methods, systematic review, and meta-analysis. The analysis distinguishes three levels: a locked structural layer, a revisable operational layer, and an interpretive instantiation layer. Using an AST-compatible RI–HITL procedure, the paper evaluates whether the empirical material supports, burdens, blocks, or leaves underdetermined theorem-derived relations concerning unresolved load, insufficient buffering, prolonged compensation, threshold brittleness, visible degradation, and restoration. The principal finding is an asymmetry between symptom improvement and durable structural restoration. Intervention studies repeatedly show that burnout indicators can improve without demonstrating that the underlying load condition has been durably reduced or that buffering has been materially restored. Longitudinal material provides the clearest support for delayed degradation and ordered movement from exhaustion toward disengagement, while diary and meta-analytic studies function primarily as boundary cases and rival explanatory surfaces. The paper does not claim causal validation of the theorem family, estimate prevalence, or conduct a meta-analysis of intervention effects. Its contribution is to show that the collapse architecture can be translated into an auditable secondary empirical design while preserving explicit scope conditions, challenge criteria, coding history, adversarial cases, and a locked empirical risk profile. Within the Society, Democracy, Organisation, and Education Research Programme, the paper functions as a secondary empirical core text in the structural viability, load, and continuity line.