Mental Health and Ill-Health

The words "stress" and "strain" in association with ill-health have in the past few years become commonplace, not only in the vocabulary of medical men, but in everyday speech. The man in the street talks of a friend getting ill or having a nervous breakdown under the strain of overwork ; the doctor talks of a stress condition, and includes under this heading a lengthening list of clinical disorders. The two words denote a phenomenon which has grown until it is now implicit in every situation in life, individual and international. It is to be read between the lines of newspapers, in the faces and gestures of the people in the streets. All who are professionally concerned with matters of health have come to regard stress and strain as a major social problem, and one about which something needs urgently to be done. It is necessary to be quite clear about what constitutes stress and strain, and what is the nature of a stress complaint, condition or disorder. It is also necessary to be aware of the widespread popular confusion in the use of the adjectives 'mental', 'nervous', 'psychological', 'subconscious', and the nouns 'nerves', 'brain', 'mind', etc. The words within these two groups are often used, even by scientific authorities, as if they were synonyms and freely interchangeable, which they are not. The essence of stress and strain is tension. In theory, at least, the cause of the tension may be wholly physical such as might be experienced by an athlete or coal miner of placid disposition. This kind of stress, caused by prolonged physical activity, affects the nerves, the muscles, the vital organs; but, were it the only kind of stress known today , we should indeed be happy, for it is simple fatigue for which nature holds the remedy. We should be happy, that is, until we realised that under these conditions man would be nothing but an animal-machine. Much closer to reality is the tension produced in different parts of the body by the activity of the mind, including the subconscious and the emotions. If this activity be sufficiently prolonged, then we may have physical stress symptoms with a wholly mental cause. We may have them, but we do not necessarily : there is room here for an important distinction. Whether there results a physical stress condition or not, depends not only on the length of the …