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Stressful Life Events and Community Mental Health Center Patients. Daniel Mueller; Daniel Edwards; Richard Yarvis. Pp. 16-24.
The first of these papers is a review article with suggestions for further research. Of particular interest are the criticisms of many studies of the relationship between stressful life events and subsequent illness. The authors show how oversimplified are the cause-and-effect notions underlying conclusions that the stressful life event itself is the cause of the psychological illness. For example, disturbance subsequent to an accident or divorce has been all too frequently interpreted as the consequence of the stressful event itself, rather than being primarily related to the pathology which in turn contributed to the development of the stressful event. The second paper illustrates the thesis propounded by the first. In a sample of patients from a community mental health center there was actually no greater incidence of stressful life events before treatment than in a control group, when the events which were probably a consequence of their psychological disturbance were eliminated from the total.