Social Stress

Physicians are not alone in their concern with stress. Other professionals, such as psychologists and social workers, invoke stress to explain social pathology, for example, alcoholism, suicide, and drug abuse. They are joined by additional individuals in implicating stress in the development of disease. Indeed, conventional wisdom has long noted that to worry, be tense, or take things hard, is to increase one's vulnerability to disease.

Sol Levine and Norman A. Scotch argue that whether the...