The third phase is the stage of asthenization. H. Selye has shown that stress accompanies any life activity and corresponds, in certain sense, to the life intensity. It increases with nervous tension, bodily injuries, muscular work, infections, in the situations of joy or sorrow, even with recollection of tragic events of the past and leads to the shift of the internal state of balance to deadaptation.
Let us denote the process of deadaptation – adaptation by one term – stressogenesis. A person in the course of the whole life gets “stress” injections and acquires stress-resistance in the form of behavioral patterns of overcoming stressful state, learns to comprehend and act in a constructive direction. If it does not occur, destructive characteristics of stress trigger. Using the expression: “Stress is the aroma and the taste of life” we should not forget that they are also different as the favorite aroma and taste in different people are different. The classical version of GAS, its evolutionary core, has a discrete nature and represents a unity of three phases. In this embodiment, the GAS came into use as “stress” and became the property of biology.
Revealed opportunities of studying and understanding what is happening in a person for a long time made their way to medicine with difficulty because of the lack of the concept “man in medicine”. Throughout the twentieth century medicine developed as an aid and health improvement of the diseased body, therefore it would not be a mistake to call it “body medicine”. Human health and disease were regarded as structural injuries of different organ/ systems under the impact of various external factors. The role of mental component was reduced to zero or completely ignored in both the questions of etiology, etiopathogenesis of diseases and those of dynamics, therapy and forecast. Psychological principles and laws acting in man, psychosocial component of man were disregarded due to total ignorance of medical sciences – psychology and sociology.
This was promoted by principle of parallelism dominating in neuroscience. Psychiatry should have been exclusion but it was also biologized. The desire of psychiatrists to find a biological substrate in the brain as a cause of schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis is still alive, despite the generally accepted by WHO definition of health. According to the Constitution of WHO, “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. This definition provokes lots of questions, reprimands and critics and it needs serious correction and specification. But it will be possible only with appearance of the concept “man in medicine”, when the issues of mental health and social well-being are considered from the viewpoint of a triad concept: “man” as a unity of biological, mental and social.
As far back as 1861 I. M. Sechenov suggested that a body without environment supporting its existence is impossible. Man thus is the system with two complex components “body + environment”. Since not only man’s body lives in the world, but rather a personality with the soul lives, acts, suffers and overcomes difficulties of life, this concept of I. M. Sechenov can be expressed using the following formula:
Man =
B (body) + P (personality) + S (soul) + E (environment) and referred to as an
INTEGRITY
Within this integrity, these composites interact with each other via bilateral feedback. Environment, including social medium, affects the body through the data flow of signals in the form of:
• positive – eustressors;
• negative – distressors;
• indifferent.
Among stimulants are identified stimulant signals acting without violating the internal balance. This category of customary signals constitutes the background. An unusual signal of the environment produces an orientation reflex aimed at assessing the environment with regard to the body threat.
If a factor is not threatening, the BE system continues functioning in the same mode. If a factor bears a threatening element, anxiety, fear, the deadaptation mechanisms of stressogenesis are triggered introducing the body into the mode of adaptation and it re-adapts. Thus, the factor containing a threat becomes a distressor causing emotional stress.
Emotional stress. The term appeared when the concept “stress” was transferred from biology to psychic (mental) reactions occurring under critical conditions. These reactions were called “emotional stress” which includes emotional reactions to stress (anxiety, fear) and somatovegetative symptoms caused by sympato-parasympatic nervous system. Actually, the emotional stress implied affective experiences separating them from non-specific stressor sympatocomplex of physiological changes in human body. “Intellect or feelings”, “mind or emotions”, “please, no emotions” – that is an incomplete list of common expressions reflecting different attitudes to emotionality and intelligence.
G. Hegel rightly noted that for intellect “…the difficulty is to get rid of the once loosely admitted by it division between the feeling and the thinking spirit and to come to the view that in man there exists only a single intelligence in feeling, will and thinking”.
With the lapse of time the term “emotional stress” has undergone a series of transformations. Thus, the second half of the last century was marked with descriptions of psychosocial models of stress, the models of response not only by the body, but by man as a whole, not only to the changing environment, but also to the psychosocial stressors. It was all about the search for a “medical” model of stress (H. Wolff, 1953), to substantiate the association between social changes and the health of population. This conformity is nowadays considered universal. The social-psychological approach to the medical model of stress is represented by several theories. The theory of loss by P. Marris (1974) assumes that each of us is a holder of some fundamental and universal beginning aimed at sustaining everything that regularly occurs in our environment attaching to it a subjective and personal meaning. Social changes are experienced as losses, disrupting the structure of interpreting the environment, thereby deeply hurting the personality. The traumatic situation (from Latin trauma – injury, wound) mentally traumatizes a person and provokes a storm of emotional experiences often in the form of affects. Therefore, the mental stress is conventionally considered to be the emotional sphere. Such view on its nature is due to the specificity of perception of stressor. At the first moment of perception anxiety and fear come to the fore limiting a judgment about the occurring and the gnostic (from Latin gnosis – cognition) and volitional components are negligible. This link is provided by activation of the autonomous neural axis as bioelectrical effect.
Some medical models of emotional stress development are described: the model of “biosocial resonance” by G. Moos (1973); the formalized model of the effect of social disintegration on health by D. Dodge, W. Martin (1970); the linguo-structuralist theory by R. Totman (1979); the theory of salutogenesis by A. Antonovsky (1979). It can be assumed that researchers of stress pursued one goal: to convince people living in the epicenter of stressful life and professionals in medicine (and they are men in their majority) that there exists the dependence of human health and longevity on the psychosocial structure of life and peculiarities of its perception. As a result emotional experiences have shifted to the category of the causes of developing stress. Thus the term “emotional stress” appeared.
Traumatic stress. It is not just a terminological kaleidoscope around the same phenomenon, but rather an understanding of the difference between diverse emotional, behavioral, somatic reactions of man on different stressors. The knowledge accumulated in the field of stress study has shown that not always the intensity of the stressor is of primary importance.
Lazarus and Folkman while delimiting the field of stress aftermath, considered only moderate stress. Different comprehension of the role of stress “intensity” (that might be light, moderate and traumatic) led researchers to different findings. Furthermore, for a long time, studies of post-stress disorders in human developed independently of stress studies. The whole problem rested on the stereotype approaches that had been adopted as the stress theory developed for the body, while the post-stress disorders were considered responses of the personality