Emotional Elements of Mental Illness: Psychological Concomitants of Stress

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Traditional theories of mental illness have attributed causality to such widely divergent views as intrapsychic mechanisms, biological processes, and interpersonal events. Popular medical explanations in which organicity has been ruled out have often attributed aberrant behavior and symptom formation to atavistic notions like “nerves” and more recently to concepts like “stress.” The “stress hypothesis,” enunciated by Selye, views maladaptive behavior as a function of sequential reaction involving alarm and mobilization, resistance, exhaustion, and ultimate decompensation with its attendant symptom formation. The present discussion articulates the putative emotional elements of abnormal behavior, namely, the uncontrollable feelings of fear, anger, and guilt. These specific emotions seem to be reactions to excessive and intolerable “stress,” the ineffectual management of which might lead to eventual symptom formation. The common sources of such reactions are identified to which therapeutic attention is recommended to help deal more effectively with these potentially counterproductive emotions.

This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit: