When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-disease Connection

The physiological responses of the three groups were identical, but the melanoma group proved most likely to deny any awareness of being anxious or of being upset by the messages on the slides. “This study found that patients with malignant melanoma displayed coping reactions and tendencies that could be described as indicating ‘repressiveness.’

We need to mount a stress response in order to preserve internal stability. The stress response is non-specific. It may be triggered in reaction to any attack—physical, biological, chemical or psychological—or in response to any perception of attack or threat, conscious

Psychological influences make a decisive biological contribution to the onset of malignant disease through the interconnections linking the components of the body’s stress apparatus: the nerves, the hormonal glands, the immune system and the brain centres where emotions are perceived and processed.

Since there is no reliable way of deciding when treatment works, what are people who “survive” their prostate cancer really surviving—their treatment or their disease?

Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person’s unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.

Hormone production is intimately affected by psychological stress. Women have always known that emotional stress affects their ovarian function and their menstrual cycles—excessive stress may even inhibit menstruation.

a statistically significant degree, were more likely to demonstrate the following traits: “the elements of denial and repression of anger and of other negative emotions . . . the external

The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however

It is astonishing to learn that lymph cells and other white blood cells are capable of manufacturing nearly all the hormones and messenger substances produced in the brain and nervous system. Even endorphins, the body’s intrinsic morphine-like mood-altering chemicals and painkillers, can be secreted by lymphocytes. And these immune cells also have

The malignant transformation of normal cells, in other words, is a process determined by many factors that have at least as much to do with the biopsychosocial state of the organism as with the type of cancer itself.