On the nature of social stress: Production of a modern mythology

In recent decades there has been increasing interest in the subject of stress and a proliferation of research into the contribution of stress as a cause of illness. This association has been widely popularised and now has an established position within the body of popular ideas about health and illness. Nevertheless, very little has been confidently established about the relationship between stress and illness. The precise nature of stress itself eludes definition and there is no consensus as to what it encompasses. There has been a confusion of the models of stress developed in the laboratory and those applied to society. Early laboratory research was modelled on 'mechanical' images of stress taken from contemporary physics and engineering. Since then the stress theory has been heavily psychologised, although it still relies for its validation on the physiological models with which it is fundamentally non-comparable. It is argued that stress is not something naturally occuring in the world, but a manufactured concept which has by now become a 'social fact'. As such it has direct implications for the ways in which people perceive their world and act within it. Stress has increasingly come to be regarded as an integral part of everyday experience. Although much of the attractiveness of the stress theory derives from its seeming to reduce the arbitrariness of suffering, it also carries with it a significant ideological component. This can serve as a means of organising and expressing a variety of ideas about the social order relating, for example, to issues of individual autonomy and responsibility, or to the ways in which society might be perceived as dangerous, repressive or pathogenic.