Life Events and Schizophrenia

Psychosocial stresses and psychiatric disorders in an outpatient population in Saudi Arabia

“…In this study neither unemployment nor any particular profession was associated with an unusually high level of stresses. Psychotic disorders evaluated by symptoms or diagnoses showed a significantly lower association with stresses than anxiety or dysthymic disorders; this supports Schwartz & Myers' findings of a low relationship between schizophrenic symptoms and life events (11,12). It is also congruent with Al-Khani's report (20) on Saudi schizophrenics where he found stresses in married women only.…”

“…Paykel (10) calculated the relative risk of suicide attempt, depression or schizophrenia following such an event during the previous 6 months was 6.3%, 5.4% and 3.0% respectively. Schwartz & Meyers (11,12) found that life events are related to anxiety, depression and somatic concerns, but explained only 2% of variance in schizophrenic symptom scores. Cooke & Hole (1) argued that 32% of all psychiatric cases can be attributed to stressful life events, in female samples it was 41%.…”

Stress and adaptation: Life span perspectives.

“…Combin-ing positive and negative change also ignores the multidimensionality of stress (cf. Chiriboga & Dean, 1978;Masuda & Holmes, 1978;Schwartz & Myers, 1977). Moreover, the conceptual restriction of stress to the acute, discrete onset conditions represented by socalled life events is an oversimplification of the topic.…”

Social Support Scales: A Methodological Note

“…In this model, the relationship between stressors-usually measured with a stressful life events scale-and certain forms of illness-especially psychiatric symptoms and depression-has been well documented (Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend 1974). To a lesser extent, this relationship has also been demonstrated for schizophrenic patients (Brown and Birley 1968;Beck and Worthen 1972;Brown et al 1973;Jacobs, Prusoff, and Paykel 1974;Jacobs and Myers 1976;Schwartz and Myers 1977). Yet, the stressors usually account for less than 10 percent of the variation of any illness measure studied.…”