You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Concepts of stress and emotional health are changing. Many believe that the rate of insanity is increasing because of the stress of modern living but the general trend of the more careful studies contradicts such statements. Where there has been a fairly consistent policy of meeting the needs for mental hospitals it is possible to obtain fairly reliable figures. One study encompassing two periods of major stress (war and depression) showed slight increase in first admissions during times of stress and this increase was in older people. Schizophrenia and manic depressive illness were less in 1933 than in 1917. The stresses of the war years produced no demonstrable increase in the psychosis rate. The depression did not appear to produce an increase in the psychoses of late life. The mental illness of these old people was not so much attributable to stress as to lack of stress.
However, military experience in World War II showed the importance of stress in the neuroses. Neuropsychiatric casualties are determined by the intensity of combat. Experience seems to have proved that nearly every man has a breaking point under extreme, prolonged stress. The major emphasis in military psychiatry is now on reduction of stress and preparing men to handle it.
Pathological mental disturbances among civilians exposed to air raids has been rare and psychiatric out-patient departments of London hospitals found a diminution in the incidence of neurotic illness.
In the first World War, despite overwhelming medical evidence to the contrary, a sudden blow was thought to be the cause of mental or emotional aberration (for example, 'shell shock'). In World War II emphasis was on cumulative stress as well as trauma.
Modern understanding of stress is based on the conceptions of earlier physiologists (Bernard, Cannon), who noted the ability of organisms to maintain relative constancy and to correct the effects of noxious forces. More recently, Selye has formulated three stages of what