International Journal of Epidemiology 2002;31:1113-1116
© International Epidemiological Association 2002
Reprints and Reflections |
Commentary: The problem with stress: minds, hearts and disease
Department of Psychiatry, Barts and the London, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK.
Correspondence: Professor Stephen Stansfeld, Department of Psychiatry, Medical Sciences Building, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK. E-mail: S.A.Stansfeld@qmul.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The problem with stress as a cause of illness is that it has too much face validity. Most people experience stress responses, where their resources are exceeded by environmental demands, at some time. Under these circumstances they may feel anything from annoyance, disappointment and frustration to severe anxiety, panic, fear, anger or depression. This is unpleasant and it is easy to extrapolate from this a belief that such emotional stress responses may give rise to illness; everyone has a personal hypothesis about this. As such, stress is a conveniently amorphous notion conjured up to explain anomalous findings that has both societal and personal resonance for a scientific readership and a medical author. It is in this light that Stewart, writing in 1949, invokes stress, together with eating fatty foods, as the major explanation of the social gradient in heart disease at the time where those, largely men, in non-manual social