Mental health: Stress
Understanding stress & stressors
Warm-up exercise:
–Can you think of an important stressful experience in your life?
–Please share your experiences.
•Serious illness or injury?
•Failing an exam?
•Becoming pregnant?
•Loss of a job?
•Loss of a loved one?
•Enduring divorce?
•Living on low-income?
•Demanding roles? (e.g., mother, wife, student, worker?)
Think about your stressful experience:
–What was stressful about it?
–Was it a short-term or single event, or a long-term situation?
–What resources (if any) help you cope with this stressful experience?
–What things did you do to cope with this experience?
–Are you a different person now as a result of this experience?
–What did you learn?
Stress: What’s it?
•Stress is the anxious or threatening feeling that comes when we interpret or appraise a situation as being more than our psychological resources can adequately handle (Lazarus, 1999).
–Stressors: They are demands that present a threatened or actual loss or scarcity of resources (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).
–In stress & coping, individual and contextual processes are intertwined (Sandler et al., 2000).
Risk factors in stress
•Risk factors: They reflect problematic individual outcomes.
–Personal distress
–Mental disorders
–Problem behaviours
•Distal risk factors: They are pre-disposing processes, which directly and indirectly shape stressors, resources, coping processes, and outcomes.
–Stress plays out differently in different contexts and for different persons.
•They influence how stress is understood & experienced
Two kinds of distal factors
A.Distal contextual factors: They include ongoing environmental conditions in various life domains:
•Cultural traditions
•Belief systems
•Practices or rituals
•Institutions
•Economic conditions
•Social and political forces
•Poverty
•Neighbourhood crime
•Lack of health care
Two kinds of distal factors
B. Distal personal factors: They include:
–Genetic and other biological factors
–Personality traits (e.g., shyness & extraversion) and temperaments
–Ongoing individual conditions (e.g., chronic illness),
–Previous life experiences (e.g., maltreatment).
Proximal stressors
•Proximal stressors: They are called proximal because they have relatively a direct relationship to stress & coping.
–They are risk factors involving both individuals and environments.
–They vary in duration, severity, quantity, personal meaning, and point of contact.
Key proximal stressors
•Examples of proximal stressors:
–Major life events (e.g., bereavement, divorce, job loss).
–Life transitions (e.g., learning new skills (graduate school), taking up new roles, road traffic crash).
–Daily hassles (e.g., traffic jams, family arguments, conflict with roommates).
–Disasters (e.g., June 3 fire & flood disaster in Accra, Hurricane Katrina in USA).
Multiple stressors 21 19
•Vicious spirals: They are cascading patterns of multiple stressors, set in motion when the loss of one resource triggers other resources.
–E.g., low-income single mother-car breaks down-no money to fix car-no t&t to work-loses job-commits suicide.
Stress reactions •The personal experience of stress includes physiological, emotional, and cognitive components.
–These factors influence one another and are often cyclical.
Cognitive appraisal & emotions: Appraisal is an ongoing process of constructing the meaning of a stressful situation or event.
–Stress appraisals may be culturally & socially constructed.
–There are individual differences in stress appraisal.
•Primary appraisal refers to our initial, subjective evaluation of a situation, in which we balance the demands of a potentially stressful situation against our ability to meet these demands.
Three kinds of stress primary appraisal
•A harm/loss appraisal situation: It means that you have already sustained some damage or injury.
•A threat appraisal situation: It means that the harm/loss has not yet taken place but you know it will happen in the near future.
•A challenge appraisal situation: It means you have the potential for gain or personal growth but you also need to mobilise your physical energy and psychological resources to meet the challenging situation.
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