Continuous While Exploring Stress

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Stress is one of the most controversial psychological issues among psychiatrists and social scientists. It is a concept that doctors and psychiatrists still do not fully understand due to the reason that different people react to stress in different ways. More importantly, how does one measure stress? How does one even identify stress? Stress is often associated with worry, fear of failure, lack of control over a certain situation, or just running late for work. However, the stress spectrum is quite broad ranging from discrete to continuous. The most discrete stressors are the ones that are the most unexpected ones; for instance, a sudden death of a close family member, a car accident, victimization of some traumatic or criminal event. Continuous …show more content…
There are new and improved methods of checklist assessment, but they continue to only include a limited amount of events that does not allow for the understanding of an individuals occurrence to be objective. Interview methods are commonly noted as the standard of assessment, focusing on both bias and personal meaning issues that self-checklists consist of. The challenges of stress being perplexed with the outcome depression, and as mentioned before the variation between personal meanings, have been actively present over the years of research done on the topic. Research shows that interview methods are a more effective form of predicting outcomes, have more accuracy in recall and are accurate in terms of dating of event occurrence. They are also more objective, ruling out the bias created by current erroneous beliefs and moods. (McQuaid et al, 2000; Simons et al, 1993) On the other hand, these interviews have their drawbacks, including exclusive training that has to be provided to interviewers. Also it has been noted that ‘context’ information that is elicited and folded into the threat ratings may itself consist of risk factors that account for the association between the purported event and depression. (Kessler 1997, Mazure …show more content…
While analyzing the relationship between the two, content and time, total ratings of the amount of stress across events, and presence or absence of at least one stressor of moderate to severe impact have been considered. (Brown & Harris, 1978) Setting aside the fact that personal meaning can exist in any event for any individual, and the agreement that depression may appear after undesirable events, researchers have examined if some events are specifically likely to create an onset for depressive reactions. The research has focused on ‘interpersonal loss’ for significance of depression, which includes bereavement, separations or threats of separation. Studies reviewed by Paykel & Cooper (1992, 2003) suggest these “exit” events frequently antedate depression and may be more prevalent in depressed individuals. The concept of loss has also been broadened to include loss of self-esteem, role loss, or loss of cherished ideas (Brown et al, 1995; Finlay-Jones & Brown, 1981) An important point to note is that each individual has unique personality traits, which leads to them interpreting different kinds of stress in different ways. Beck (1983) and Blatt (1974) described these traits as “depression vulnerabilities” and said that depleting self-worth will lead to depressive reactions in individuals. Therefore, one individual