“Stress Knocks Hard on Your Immune System”: Asthma and the Discourse on Stress

Abstract

Stress has been described by anthropologists and other scholars as a problematic concept, a discourse, a modern metaphor, a collective representation, and a cultural resource. The vast array of academic work in the arena of stress research belies the historical reality of stress as an object of inquiry; rather, stress is presented as new, the story of its emergence intermingled with processes of industrialization, individualism, and perceptions of modern life. This article traces the uses to which the concept of stress is put in the illness narratives of persons with asthma. It argues that multiple invocations of stress not only make visible the workings of personal responsibility and individualism regarding chronic illness management in the contemporary United States but also gesture toward the social relations of sickness that lie beyond individual control.

A Psychological Perspective of Eye Floaters

“…A considerable amount of research has explored the role of personal responsibility in illness (Berland, 1995; Derry & McLachlan, 1995; Heijmans & de Ridder, 1998; Nosarti, Roberts, Crayford, McKenzie, & David, 2002; Pohlman & Becker, 2006; Schiaffino & Cea, 1995; Skinner et al, 2011; Sulik, 2005), but responsibility usually referred to the tendency of patients to attribute the cause of their illness to themselves or to other factors, such as stress or randomness. Moving from a cognitive framework that considers responsibility in terms of representations of the world (causal attribution) to a constructivist framework that focuses on construing through action (Cipolletta, in press), we attributed personal responsibility to the choice of confiding in oneself or in others for help.…”