You go to the Doctor, "yes, well you want to watch your stress levels?"
The children use the word 'stressy', don't get 'stressed out' Dad
But how has this so commonly used word come about and what does it actually mean?
It helps to look at the notion of stress in some historical context
Stress the same Beast on different Backs
The syndrome was codified after Vietnam. The beast on the back – and a grab-bag of other distressing symptoms – came to be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the official definition of this condition requires a traumatic event ‘outside the range of usual human experience … one that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone’, followed by such symptoms as repetitive recall of the trauma, psychological numbing, amnesia, insomnia or other forms of automatic arousal. Readers of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon or Pat Barker should not be surprised that this description of PTSD turns out to have a strong resemblance to the description of shell-shock that has become part of the modern literary tradition: the psychiatrists are, after all, simply describing the same beast on different backs,
Stress abound in Shakespeare, the Macbeths after their dastardly deeds
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace
the same facts but different backs
Shell Shock A 1st World War, anecdote an Officer in the trenches has just had his foot blown off
he requests of his fellow Officer
"got a handkerchief, old chap?"
"I am afraid I don't at the moment, Peter."
The sangfroid of a certain class is evident.
'Post traumatic stress disorder' Vietnam
A London cockney 2015 "that geyzer, he's well stressed out, he is."
(Here we have the example of language speaking us, not us speaking language)
Is the words 'stress' a catch all word, which we mindlessly apply? Is it the nosology of medicine.
source:
The children use the word 'stressy', don't get 'stressed out' Dad
But how has this so commonly used word come about and what does it actually mean?
It helps to look at the notion of stress in some historical context
Stress the same Beast on different Backs
The syndrome was codified after Vietnam. The beast on the back – and a grab-bag of other distressing symptoms – came to be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the official definition of this condition requires a traumatic event ‘outside the range of usual human experience … one that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone’, followed by such symptoms as repetitive recall of the trauma, psychological numbing, amnesia, insomnia or other forms of automatic arousal. Readers of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon or Pat Barker should not be surprised that this description of PTSD turns out to have a strong resemblance to the description of shell-shock that has become part of the modern literary tradition: the psychiatrists are, after all, simply describing the same beast on different backs,
Stress abound in Shakespeare, the Macbeths after their dastardly deeds
ts of a heady fight’. Guilt after
mischief leads the Macbeths to
eat
our meal in fear and sleepIn the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace
the same facts but different backs
Shell Shock A 1st World War, anecdote an Officer in the trenches has just had his foot blown off
he requests of his fellow Officer
"got a handkerchief, old chap?"
"I am afraid I don't at the moment, Peter."
The sangfroid of a certain class is evident.
'Post traumatic stress disorder' Vietnam
A London cockney 2015 "that geyzer, he's well stressed out, he is."
(Here we have the example of language speaking us, not us speaking language)
Is the words 'stress' a catch all word, which we mindlessly apply? Is it the nosology of medicine.
source:
The Beast on My Back Gerald Weissmann
- The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder by Allan
Young
Princeton, 327 pp, £28.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 691 03352 8
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