Article: The hidden links between mental disorders

[Hoopoe]

Well I don't know of course, but adrenal insufficiency comes to mind.

There could be as of yet undiscovered ways for hormonal secretions to be inadequate in response to stress. That might produce an illness where the person doesn't handle stress well and tries to manage this by avoiding stressful situations. That could look like a kind of depression with anxiety and avoidance behaviour.

 

[Hoopoe]

Reduced stress tolerance could also be part of the body's response to illness, as a way of encouraging risk averse behaviour at a time when any additional problem could be disastrous.

 

[rvallee]

Has anyone suggested that?

Uh? It's basically the foundation of psychosomatics, or something like it. That's what pinning chronic illnesses on the mad speed of modern life means, or whatever many forms that argument takes. It's explicit in neurasthenia. I'm not sure I've ever seen a psychosomatic model that did not implicitly argue that and most basically agree with the neurasthenia model, they just know it's too outdated to use anymore.

 

[Saz94]

The cause could be not stress by itself but a reduced stress tolerance that turns ordinary stress into an overly difficult problem.

Claims that stress triggered some illness could be due to the illness causing a reduced stress tolerance. The illness could start at a level of severity where it is not recognizable yet, even though it's already having an effect on the person. When it gradually worsens over time, the experience for the patient could be that of slowly struggling more and more and feeling overwhelmed and stressed with ordinary daily activities, until they reach a point where it is apparent that something is wrong. If they are then diagnosed, it could look exactly like stress caused the illness.

Yes that's what happened to me

 

[Mithriel]

Has anyone suggested that?

Neurasthenia was believed to be caused by the fast pace of modern life - in the 1800s! There was a paper recently that claimed that neurasthenia was still a good diagnosis for today.

There was an article in the New Scientist that must be from this same research. It spoke about a large genetics study showing certain SNPs were more common in mental disease but none of them were more common for any specific disease.

I was willing to believe them until they were quoted as saying that this meant that a single treatment, CBT, would be successful at treating them all...

It was in the issue dated 25th January.