Governments Under Stress

"One of the book's many strengths is the way it brings an analytic focus to recent events. It does so in an engaging way, with the book overall written extremely well. And the emphasis on the role of political institutions is right on target."

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

Stress. Everyone is talking about it, suffering from it, trying desperately to manage it-now more than ever. From 1970 to 1980, 2,326 academic articles appeared with the word "stress" in the title. In the decade between 2000 and 2010 that number jumped to 21,750. Has life become ten times more stressful, or is it the stress concept itself that has grown exponentially over the past 40 years? In One Nation Under Stress, Dana Becker argues that our national infatuation with the therapeutic culture has created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the tensions of daily life by turning inward, ignoring the social and political realities that underlie those tensions. Becker shows that although stress is often associated with conditions over which people have little control-workplace policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic inequality, war in the age of terrorism-the stress concept focuses most of our attention on how individuals react to stress. A proliferation of self-help books and dire medical warnings about the negative effects of stress on our physical and emotional health all place the responsibility for alleviating stress-though yoga, deep breathing, better diet, etc.-squarely on the individual. The stress concept has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political shifts. Nevertheless, we persist in the all-American belief that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves rather than tackling the root causes of stress. Examining both research and popular representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker traces the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it has been transformed into an all-purpose vehicle for defining, expressing, and containing middle-class anxieties about upheavals in American society.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2017 in the subject Psychology - Clinic and Health Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, , language: English, abstract: The main objective of this study is to compare the organizational stress in reference to the organizational role, values, coping strategies and conditions of mental health of technical and non-technical government officers working in different ministries and departments of Nepal government. The last couple of decade’s researches has established the complexity of the construct, and places the individual stress experience within a larger organizational context of people’s relation to their job. Recently, the work on role stress has expanded nationally and internationally and has led to new conceptual models. The focus on role stress and its relation with mental health; value, and the coping strategies of individual promise to yield new perspectives on interventions to alleviate the stress. Earlier studies showed that the contribution of various aspects of role stress is causing adverse effects on mental health of employees and were found different from one study sample to another. In light of the above study, a need is felt to investigate the relationship between role stress and mental health among Nepalese civil servants working in different positions. The Nepalese political culture and unionism are also the major determinants of role stress. Government authority should focus on visioning and developing strategies in advance to make the government functionaries effective and efficient by conducting proper research in the government system of Nepal in relation to role stress and its components. Therefore, the present study of stress and mental health of government employees is in relation with their role stress and mental health. The research is quantitative in its approach. For the purpose of the study, 284 Nepalese civil servants were selected randomly. The result, on the basis of research hypothesis, showed that class III officers reported higher level of stress than the class I and class II ones, but there was no significant difference of stress among the I, II and III class officers. So, it indicated that level of stress in class II officer was similar to that of I and III class officer because of their duel nature of work.

As the population of older Americans grows, it is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Differences in health by racial and ethnic status could be increasingly consequential for health policy and programs. Such differences are not simply a matter of education or ability to pay for health care. For instance, Asian Americans and Hispanics appear to be in better health, on a number of indicators, than White Americans, despite, on average, lower socioeconomic status. The reasons are complex, including possible roles for such factors as selective migration, risk behaviors, exposure to various stressors, patient attitudes, and geographic variation in health care. This volume, produced by a multidisciplinary panel, considers such possible explanations for racial and ethnic health differentials within an integrated framework. It provides a concise summary of available research and lays out a research agenda to address the many uncertainties in current knowledge. It recommends, for instance, looking at health differentials across the life course and deciphering the links between factors presumably producing differentials and biopsychosocial mechanisms that lead to impaired health.