Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (9 page)

Then there are the lay definitions. These include many very different feelings. Other ‘meanings’ refer to external problems, like overwork, not enough work, no work, sitting still in traffic, rushing about, being bullied, having domestic troubles. Finally ‘stress’ can mean an impressive variety of physiological mechanisms: fight-or-flight, heart rate, hormonal secretions during any or all of the above, and so on. All real, all different, all being medicalised and turned into a disease.

The stress industry’s mantra is this:

Being calm is normal and the key to a healthy life.

This is untrue, but you need to remember that the stress industry
sells
calm.

The stress industry tells you that if you’re not relaxed, you are in mortal danger. You not only have ‘stress’ but you could succumb to the scores of conditions they claim are ‘stress-related’ (just about any health irregularity you care to name). And then the industry stands by with its potted endocrinology, its thermometers, its squeezy balls, its ‘stress dots’, counselling and calming courses to fail to cure you.

Emotional arousal of any kind is currently called ‘stress’. Even being excited about a promotion or a holiday is said to be ‘stressful’. This is not only misleading and ridiculous, but malign. Because there are hundreds of different and opposite things that go by the name of ‘stress’, when we keep using the s-word we are constantly giving ourselves the message that not being calm is abnormal and pathological.

We need to revert to the kind of descriptive words all previous generations used to describe their feelings, before the theory of ‘stress management’ came along.

These are not only more accurate but non-medical.

Official ‘calm-down’ warnings

There is a direct connection between ‘stress management’ and the current depression epidemic. Calm-down drugs, for example, work by chemically suppressing and slowing down the activity of the brain. When I asked the Department of Health: ‘Are tranquillisers depressant?’ spokesman Steve Ryan replied:

Tranquillisers are not a class of drug recognised by the DOH as such because there are different types, such as hypnotics, anxiolytics and barbiturates,
but in so far as drugs are intended to calm people down, then ultimately the answer is yes – they are depressant.
²

The American Medical Association warns of the dangers:

Depressants include barbiturates (such as Amytal, Nembutal and Seconal), benzodiazepines (such as Valium, Librium and Rohypnol), and methaqualone (Quaalude).
Depressant drugs, commonly known as tranquillizers or sleeping pills, are prescribed by doctors to relieve anxiety and sleeplessness.
In controlled doses these drugs produce a feeling of relaxation and well-being. Large doses result in intoxication similar to drunkenness.
³

The stress management industry is not reactive, like the NHS or Florence Nightingale. It is
proactive
. It promotes ‘stress awareness’. It tells people they are suffering from stress and that they must look out for signs and symptoms. It takes problems and feelings and medicalises them in order to profit. And it claims to have mountains of scientific evidence.

SLOPPY SCIENCE

Today we look for our wisdom on human emotions and their consequences not to William Shakespeare, who laid bare the human soul, but to a man who tortured 1,400 rats a week in his Montreal laboratory. His name was Hans Selye and he was Austro-Canadian and didn’t speak terribly good English. In the 1930s he borrowed the term ‘stress’ from engineering, muddling up two different engineering concepts: ‘stress’ (force exerted on an object) and ‘strain’ (deformation caused by that force). Fellow scientists attacked his methodologies, yet Selye’s ‘stress’ idea took off. Its vagueness suited researchers who were not worried about rigour and just wanted to get funding for their work on human health and emotions. Even the very latest branch of ‘stress’ research, PNI or psychoneuroimmunology, shows no significant improvement in its grasp of the very thing under investigation.

Flaws in the stress ‘science’

When I was a University of East Anglia research fellow working with scientists at their Centre for Environmental Risk, we looked at hundreds of studies and found many serious and invalidating flaws. These included major definition failure (having no fixed control term), adaptation of the control term to suit funding, poor logic (for example, ‘It happened after it therefore it was caused by it’), confusion of arousal and resignation (a very dangerous flaw, since they are different biological mechanisms that impact very differently on the body), confusion of stimulus and response (opposites), reliance on animal models, reliance on self-report data, poor methodologies, lack of follow-up studies, inadequate control groups, small samples, false extrapolation, conclusions drawn on the basis of surmise and a mass of technical errors.

If my research had simply shown that ‘stress management’ was bogus, I wouldn’t have bothered to write the book. I knew the reception it would get, and that I would be accused of attacking ‘stress sufferers’ rather than exposing the powerful multi-million pound industry that is deceiving them about their normal emotions and mechanisms.

When people are constantly being told alarmist nonsense that they are going to die, and that they must avoid ‘stress’ when they don’t know exactly what it is, they become hyper-vigilant (over-alert) about their health. When they say they are ‘stressed’ or ‘stressed out’ they are really experiencing fear and anxiety:

•
that they can’t cope with life’s demands
 

•
that they are about to break down mentally or physically
 

•
that they need to avoid arousal
 

•
that they need to calm down.

These fears and anxieties have not happened by accident. They have been deliberately engendered by the stress management industry itself spreading myths about our health and our feelings.

Popular stress myths

‘Stress is bad, pressure is good’
How come? Because stress is pressure you don’t like, and pressure is stress you do?

‘Stress causes disease’
That very much depends on what you mean by ‘stress’. If you mean fight-or-flight, the stress research itself doesn’t show that arousal causes disease. It shows that helplessness and apathy cause disease. If you mean being in a hurry or being very busy, research on anti-ageing suggests that time pressure and challenges increase the production of heatshock proteins that repair damaged cells and prolong life, a process known as hormesis. As we age this process slows down, but experts like Dr Marios Kyriazis say that seeking out challenges and rushing about ‘exercise’ the vital repair mechanism.
⁴

‘We work harder now’
We are apparently ‘worse off than previous generations’. Under the 1834 Poor Law there were 600 workhouses in Britain. Compared with present-day worries, such as not having time to read the 11-section Daily Telegraph, they had it tough. Up north people got up at three in the morning and clattered to work at mills in their clogs. People were ‘clemmed’ (frozen and starved) to death. Down south Daniel Defoe was in a debtors’ prison and Charles Dickens was working in a boot-blacking factory at the age of 12. Children were up chimneys and down mines. People laboured in William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’ for barely enough to buy bread and potatoes.

‘The pace of life is faster now’
Our brains can’t cope, say the stress merchants. Well, past generations also had peculiar conditions supposedly caused by the pace of life: ‘brain fag’, neurasthenia, nervous debility, ‘nerves’. A typical sufferer was Mrs Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, written in 1813: ‘I am frightened out of my wits; and have such tremblings, such flutterings, all over me, such spasms in my side, and pains in my head, and such beatings at heart, that I can get no rest by night or day.’

We are not really more nervous or frenetic or hard-working now than past generations. These are all myths.

On the other hand, stress management can kill.

Kava kava, a herbal stress remedy, has been linked to fatalities from liver damage. Benzodiazepines, so-called ‘minor’ tranquillisers, extrapolating from Home Office statistics between 1964 and 2004, were involved in 17,000 deaths. How come? The American Medical Association explains:

All depressants have a high potential for abuse. Tolerance to depressants develops quickly and may lead to physical and/or psychological dependence. These drugs work by temporarily shutting down some areas of the central nervous system; the user who takes increasingly large doses as tolerance develops risks the central nervous system shutting down entirely. This risk becomes particularly acute when depressants are combined with alcohol, which produces a synergistic effect – a phenomenon best understood as ‘one plus one equals three.’ Because the lethal dose of depressants remains the same as tolerance increases, a person taking heavy doses of depressants or mixing them with alcohol risks coma or death.
⁵

One very popular ‘stress’ remedy available
without
prescription is alcohol – yet another chemical depressant that dulls the mind and can lead to depression, mental illness and death. Nicotine absorbed quickly or in high doses, is a depressant. One could go on …

All this is very insulting to the human brain. As we shall see, it revels in engaging with the world and rewards us for having the courage to face up to our problems. Accepting life’s challenges and completing tasks provides not just
real
relaxation (as distinct from the artificial kind) but what is infinitely more satisfying –
resolution
– as well.

NOTES 

1
. Professor Lightman speaking on
Equinox: The Science of Stress
, Channel 4, November 2000.

2
. Department of Health, Information Line, 7 April 2004.

3
. American Medical Association, Medical Library, 1999.

4
. See Marios Kyriazis,
The Anti-Aging Plan.
Element Books, 2000.

5
. American Medical Association Library statement 1999.