Stress can negatively impact mental health in several ways. Hans Selye identified the general adaptation syndrome with three stages of response to stressors: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. Prolonged or severe stress can precipitate mental disorders like depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and schizophrenia by disrupting the body's stress response systems. Stress may also worsen existing mental health conditions or physical health problems like heart disease, infections, and cancer. While the links between stress and mental illness are complex, reducing stress through lifestyle changes or treatment is important for maintaining good mental health.

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How does stress affect mental health ?
 Stress is very important word of our daily life. In
a simple word, it is our response to real or
imagined challenges or threats.
 A stressor is an environmental stimulus, that
affects an organism, producing physical and

2. psychological effects such as tension and
anxiety.
 This challenge involves a transaction between
the person and the situation.
 Stress is also a subjective experience that may
or may not correspond to physiological
responses.
 Stress influences human biology, physiology,
behavior, emotion and cognitive process
 Term “Stress” was coined by Hans Selye (A
Canadian medical researcher), who gave the
famous concept of The general adaptation
syndrome.

3. The general adaptation syndrome.
According to Selye, people’s responses to a
of
stressor are similar, regardless of the type
stressor.
There are three stages in stress-
1-Alarm (an initial short stage) 2-
Resistance (a longer period) 3-Exhaustion
(the final stage)
1-Alarm
Alarm begins when the stressor first appears.
People experience physiological arousal.
The sympathetic nervous system activates.
2 Resistance
Resistance occurs after
exposure to a stressor.
a relatively long

4. The person seems to have adapted to the
stressor.
The person may appear normal, but
physiological responses are not.
3-Exhaustion
Exhaustion occurs when adaptability is depleted.
If stress is notreduced,
physical, mental, and emotional
exhaustion occurs.
Exhaustion may result in
serious illness or death.

5. What is mental stress ?
STRESS TYPES:
There are many ways to classify stress. They can
be:
1-Life events : They are identifiable, discrete
changes in life pattern that disrupt the usual
behavior and threaten the process well-being.

6. For example Bereavement, the reaction to
loss of loved one, is the prototype stressful life
event.
2-Chronic stress: It includes long term
condition that challenges the person, including
financial deprivation, ongoing interpersonal
difficulties and persistent treat to security.
e.g. living in a dangerous neighborhood.
3-Developmental
with
transitional
stressor: Those
associated phases of
psychosocial
development (adolescence, childbirth).
4-Daily hassles: They are ordinary but stressful
occurrences that are universal in modern life.
e.g.managing household finances,
unpleasant
interaction with neighbourers.
5-Accidental stressor: Associated with
unexpected non-developmental life events.

7. e.g. death
Interesting types:
Enstress : They are pleasant, describable events.
Distress: They are unpleasant, undesirable
events.
Other various classifications can be…
1.Personal and impersonal life events.
2.Major and minor life events.
Negative effects of stress
Stress can also be produced from frustration, conflict
or pressure.
Others:
A concept of people poisoning has been given to
people producing stress in other (stress generators
or stress carriers).

8. How does stress affect mental health ?
 Mental disorders have been ascribed to an
imbalance in bodily humors, to the influence of
external spiritual or other supernatural forces,
and to moral or somatic deficiency.
 In the early to mid-1800s, a school of thought
emerged, led by Philippe Pinel in Paris and
Amariah Brigham in America, that the
expression of mental illness was affected by life
circumstances and, more broadly, by societal
factors.
 These various influences converge in the very
popular biopsychosocial model proposed by
Meyer.
 Multideterminate model of mental illness
dominates modern psychiatric thinking.

9. Disorder
of stress.
described as a direct consequence
 Reaction to severe stress and adjustment
disorder acute stress reaction, post traumatic
stress disorder, adjustment disorder comes
under this category.
These characterize stress as an acute sever
stress (a serious threat to security, physical
integrity of the individual or the loved one or an
unusually sudden and threatening change in the
social position or network of the individual) or a
continued trauma.
Causes of mental stress

10. The temporal association of the disorders with
stress are:
 Acute stress reaction onset should be within
minutes, for PTSD (Post traumatic distress
disorder) it is less than 6 months and for
adjustment disorder onset should be within
one month.
 Conversion disorder/ dissociation
disorder- the criteria to meet a diagnosis is

11. evidence for psychological causation in the
form of clear association in time with stressful
events and probes or disturbed relationship.
 Symptoms are judged to be initiated or
exacerbated by preceding conflicts or other
stress.
 Posttraumatic Stress disorder (PTSD) has its
onset after particularly traumatic (often life-
threatening) events, such as violent assault or
serious accidents, and is denoted by the
presence of prominent dissociative symptoms
(e.g., derealization, numbing).
 When acute stress disorder occurs after trauma,
it identifies individuals, who are at several fold
increased risk for the subsequent development
of PTSD (and major depression).

12. Lasting personality change after catastrophic
experience :
 Here stress has been characterized to be so
extreme . It is usually is a prolonged exposure in
life threatening circumstances.
 Similar personality changes occur in psychiatric
illness that this develops following clinical
recovery from a mental disorder that must have
been experienced as emotionally extremely
stressful and shattering to the patients self
image.
 Adverse life events and stressful social and
familial background play an important role in
determining the course of illness in general and
episodes of relapse in particular.

13. Schizophrenia:
 Role of stress is uncertain in schizophrenia. The
stress vulnerability model which states
schizophrenias a biologic illness is postulated to
be stress related and the onset and relapse is
related to both.
 Expressed emotion a form of every day stress
has been studied by various researchers and
found to be related to causative for
schizophrenic relapses.

14.  Studies of expressed emotion demonstrated
that individuals with schizophrenia residing in
homes with high expressed emotion tend to
relapse at twice the rate of those who live in
families with low expressed emotion.
 Chronic interpersonal stress, usually studied in
the context of the family, has been shown to be
an important risk factor for relapse in
schizophrenia.
 Other stressors like poverty, homelessness, and
criminal victimization also powerfully affect the
clinical course of their illness.
 Schizophrenia renders the individual more
susceptible and sensitive to the negative effects
of even minor stressors.
Affective Disorders (Mood disorders)

15. Other than genetic and biologic factors which are
known to play a major role in etiology of mood
disorder, psychosocial factors do influence onset
timing type and outcome of affective episodes.
 But the nature of association and mechanism of
action is still unclear One proposed mechanism
is social rhythm dysfunction.
 Stressor as a precipitant of bipolar relapse is
applicable only for earlier episodes is a
consistent research findings
Time frame for life events preceding the onset of an
episode for unipolar depression proposed is 4 weeks
Though chronic difficulties up to 6 mts have been
shown to exert effects
The time frame for life event stress precipitating a
bipolar relapse has been proposed to be 3 wks.

16. Recent life events in patients completed suicide in
bipolar/unipolar illness is found to higher within the
last 3 months.
 New studies raise the possibility that childhood
trauma leaves a neurohormonal scar that leads
to stress and may be a vulnerability factor for
mood disorders.
How does stress affect mental health ?
Anxiety Disorders
 Early life stressors, sexual or physical abuse, may
be risk factors.for the later development of panic
disorder, particularly in women.
 Panic disorders frequently has its onset in the
context of stressful life events. In terms of early
life stressors, there is growing evidence that
certain adverse life events such as sexual and

17. physical abuse, may be risk factor for later
development or panic disorder particularly
women.
What are symptoms of mental stress ?
Stress, Depression, and Rheumatoid Arthritis
Stress and depression can lead to HPA
(Hypothalamic pituitary activation,a type of neural
system which controls entire body functioning) axis
activation and increases of cytokines (a type of
inflammatory biomarker in body).
 Moreover, the presence of depression in
rheumatoid arthritis patients undergoing stress
is associated with exaggerated increases of
IL-6, a biomarker predictive of disease
progression.

18. intervention that decreases
 Psychological
emotional
improvements
distress produced, and in
diseaseactivity in
rheumatoid arthritis patients.
 Onset of major depression was best explained
by a model that, genes are also responsible for
connection of depression with effects of stressful
life events.
Substance use
 In marijuana users, drug is used in response to
a failure to cope with stress (interpersonal,
economic, scholastic) but the presence of these
stressors are not necessary to maintain the
addiction.
 Role of stress in relapse in general is noted as
one of the many factors contributing to relapse
but definite role is confusing.

19.  Possibly stress elevates relative
the personsability to
risk
by
cope
with
decreasing
temptation.
 Stressful life events have been associated with
increased alcohol use but this associations is
also influenced by other variables and the
interaction is complex.
Others:

20. Acute or short term disturbances is usually
associated with variety of situational stress in sexual
disorders.
Psychological distress appear to be quite common
with sleep disorder.
In chronic insomnia in an adult stress appear to be
primary and in other sleep disorder it is secondary in
origin.
Cardiovascular Disease (Heart disease)
Psychological and physical stressors leads to
release of pro-inflammatory cytokines and
expression of adhesion molecules that bind and
immune cells to the vascular endothelium in blood.
Depression is associated with activation of the
endothelium.

21. In patients who have recently experienced acute
coronary events (like heart attack), levels of the
endothelium activation marker, soluble
intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (sICAM) are
significantly higher among depressed patients
than among non depressed patients.
Infectious Disease:
Studies show that individuals reporting more
psychological stress have both a higher incidence
and greater severity of certain infectious illnesses,
such as Epstein-Barr virus infections and the
common cold.
HIV (AIDS)
Depression,bereavement, andmaladaptive
coping responses to stress (including the stress of

22. HIV infection itself) have all been shown to predict
the rate of immune system decay in HIV patients.
Cancer:
 Research
tocancer
showing psychological parameters
onset andprogression are
inconsistent in humans and the role of the
immune system in mediating any
psychological effects on disease course is not
established.
 Though, psychological interventions can lead
to decreased distress, increases in active
coping.
 Higher rate of survival seen in malignant
melanoma(a type of skin cancer) patients,
and women with advanced breast cancer who
have received such interventions.
 These findings indicate that role of stress in
cancers patients should not overlooked.

23. Conclusion:
If you continue to experience stress, don’t be
scared to seek expert help. It does n’t indicate you
are a failure. It is essential to take help as asoon
as possible so you can start to think better.
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