Answer the questions to the text.
How may stress be defined?
What does the experience of feeling stressed depend on?
What types of stress are known to you?
When do people usually experience frustration?
When does conflict occur?
What types of conflict have been identified by psychologists?
What do we mean by life changes?
Why did psychologists develop the Social Readjustment Rating Scale?
What does pressure involve?
When are people usually under pressure?
What is pressure more strongly related to?
Choose the facts to prove that:
Most frustrations are brief and insignificant.
People aren’t very objective in their appraisals of potentially stressful events.
Pressures to conform to others’ expectations are common in our fives.
Text 9 extreme stress
Sources of Extreme Stress
Extreme stress has a variety of sources, ranging from unemployment to wartime combat, from violent natural disaster to rape. Extreme stress marks a radical departure from everyday life, such that a person cannot carry on as before and, in some cases, never fully recovers. What are some major stressors? What effect do they have on people? How do people cope?
Unemployment and Underemployment
Joblessness is a major source of stress. When the jobless rate rises, so do first admissions to psychiatric hospitals, infant mortality, deaths from heart disease, alcohol-related diseases, and suicide. “Things just fell apart,” one worker said after both he and his wife lost their jobs. People usually react to the stress of unemployment in several stages. First comes a period of relaxation and relief, in which they take a vacation of sorts, confident they will find another job. Stage 2, marked by continued optimism, is a time of concentrated job hunting. In Stage 3, a period of vacillation and doubt, jobless people become moody, their relationships with family and friends deteriorate, and they scarcely bother to look for work. By Stage 4, a period of malaise and cynicism, they have simply given up. Although these effects are not universal, they are quite common. Moreover, there are indications that joblessness may not so much create new psychological difficulties as bring preciously hidden ones to the surface. Two studies have shown that death rates go up and psychiatric symptoms worsen not just during periods of unemployment but also during short, rapid upturns in the economy. This finding lends support to the point we discussed earlier that change, whether good or bad, causes stress.
Even among people who are employed, status on the job — where they stand in their company’s occupational hierarchy — affects health.
Common sense holds that high-powered tycoons are especially likely to die suddenly of a heart attack. In reality, the reverse is true: On average, high-level executives live longer than messengers and mailroom clerks.
Divorce and Separation
As Coleman and colleagues (1987) observe, “the deterioration or ending of an intimate relationship is one of the more potent of stressors and one of the more frequent reasons why people seek psychotherapy. ” After a breakup, both partners often feel they have failed at one of life’s most important endeavors. Strong emotional ties frequently continue to bind the pair. If only one spouse wants to end the marriage, the one initiating the divorce may feel sadness and guilt at hurting a once-loved partner, and the rejected spouse may vacillate between anger, humiliation, and self-recrimination over his or her role in the failure. Even if the decision to separate was mutual, ambivalent feelings of love and hate can make life upsetting and turbulent. Adults are not the only ones who are stressed by divorce, of course. A national survey of the impact of divorce on children found that a majority suffer intense emotional stress at the time of divorce; although most recover within a year or two (especially if the custodial parent establishes a stable home and their parents do not fight about child rearing), a minority experience long-term problems.
Bereavement
For decades it was widely held that following the death of a loved one, people go through a necessary period of intense grief during which they work through their loss and, about a year later, pick up and go on with their fives. Psychologists and physicians as well as the public at large have endorsed this cultural wisdom. But Wortman and others have challenged this view on the basis of their own research and reviews of the literature on loss.
According to Wortman, the first myth about bereavement is that people should be intensely distressed when a loved one dies, which suggests that people who are not devastated are behaving abnormally, perhaps pathologically. Often, however, people have prepared for the
loss, said their goodbyes, and feel little remorse or regret; indeed, they may be relieved that their loved one is no longer suffering. The second myth — that people need to work through their grief — may lead family, friends, and even physicians to consciously or unconsciously encourage the bereaved to feel or act distraught. Moreover, physicians may deny those mourners who are deeply disturbed needed antianxiety or antidepressant medication “for their own good. ” The third myth holds that people who find meaning in the death, who come to a spiritual or existential understanding of why it happened, cope better than those who do not. In reality, people who do not seek greater understanding are the best adjusted and least depressed. The fourth myth—that people should recover from a loss within a year or so — is perhaps the most damaging. Parents trying to cope with the death of an infant and adults whose spouse or child died suddenly in a vehicle accident continue to experience painful memories and wrestle with depression years after. But because they have not recovered “on schedule,” members of their social network may become unsympathetic. Hence, the people who need support most may hide their feelings because they do not want to make other people uncomfortable and fail to seek treatment because they, too, believe they should recover on their own.
Not all psychologists agree with this “new” view of bereavement. But most agree that research on loss must take into account individual (and group or cultural) differences, as well as variations in the circumstances surrounding a loss.
Catastrophes
Catastrophes include floods, earthquakes, violent storms, fires, and plane crashes. Psychological reactions to all these stressful events have much in common. At first, in the shock stage, “the victim is stunned, dazed, and apathetic,” and sometimes even “stuporous, disoriented, and amnesic for the traumatic event.” Then, in the suggestible stage, victims are passive and quite ready to do whatever rescuers tell them to do. In the third phase, the recovery stage, victims regain emotional balance, but anxiety often persists; and they may need to recount their experiences over and over again. Some investigators report that in later stages survivors may feel irrationally guilty because they lived while others died.
Combat and Other Threatening Personal Attacks
Wartime experiences often cause soldiers intense and disabling combat stress that persists long after they have left the battlefield. Similar reactions — including bursting into rage over harmless remarks, sleep disturbances, cringing at sudden loud noises, psychological confusion, uncontrollable crying, and silently staring into space for long periods — are also frequently seen in survivors of serious accidents, especially children, and of violent crimes such as rapes and muggings. Figure below shows the traumatic effects of war on the civilian population, based on composite statistics obtained after recent civil wars. Rates of clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are around 50 percent, whereas rates of even 10 percent would be considered high in a normal community.
Mental trauma in societies at war
In societies that have undergone the stress of war, nearly everyone suffers some psychological reaction, rangingfrom serious mental illness to feelings of demoralization. Rates of clinical depression are as high as 50 percent.
Demoralization
Physical and mental exhaustion
Seeking justice/revenge
Fear of government
Clinical depression/PTSD
Serious family conflict
Psychiatric incapacitation
Serious mental illness